What is Customer Effort Score?
Customer Effort Score, or CES, measures how much work someone had to do to get something done. You ask a version of "how easy was it to do X?" and they answer on a scale.
It came out of research finding that reducing effort keeps customers better than exceeding expectations does. People rarely leave because you failed to delight them. They leave because something was harder than it needed to be, repeatedly.
How CES is calculated
CES = sum of all responses Ă· number of responses
The usual scale is one to seven, where seven is very easy, and the score is the average. Some teams use a five-point scale, and some report the percentage of respondents choosing the top two options, which is closer to how CSAT works.
All three are valid. Mixing them across quarters is not, because the numbers stop being comparable.
For example, ten people answer 7, 6, 6, 5, 7, 4, 6, 7, 5 and 6 on a one-to-seven scale. The responses add up to 59, and 59 divided by 10 gives a CES of 5.9.
What questions does a CES survey ask?
A CES survey asks one question about how easy a specific task was, usually followed by an optional question about what would have made it easier.
- Agreement statement (CES 2.0): "[Company] made it easy for me to handle my issue." Answered from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree).
- Direct ease question: "How easy was it to [change your plan] today?" Answered from 1 (very difficult) to 5 or 7 (very easy).
- Original effort question (2010): "How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?" Answered from 1 (very low effort) to 5 (very high effort), so a lower score is better.
Pick one wording and keep it. The bracketed part should name the exact task, and the follow-up ("What would have made this easier?") is where you learn what to change.
What is a good CES score?
On a seven-point scale, above 5 is generally treated as good and above 6 as strong. As with every experience metric, the useful comparison is your own previous measurement on the same question and the same audience.
What matters more than the absolute number is which touchpoints score worse than the others. A CES of 5.2 overall is not a finding. A CES of 5.2 overall with 3.4 on the cancellation flow is.
When to ask for CES
Immediately after the task, while the effort is still fresh. The usual moments are after a support interaction, after onboarding, after a self-service task like changing a plan, and after anything that involves a form.
Asking later produces a general impression rather than a measurement of the thing you wanted to measure.
Who created the Customer Effort Score?
CES was introduced by the Corporate Executive Board (CEB), now part of Gartner, in the 2010 Harvard Business Review article "Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers" by Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman and Nicholas Toman.
Their research found that reducing customer effort did more for loyalty than going beyond expectations, and that finding is why CES is linked to churn. In 2013, Dixon, Toman and Rick DeLisi published "The Effortless Experience", and CEB moved from the original effort question to the agreement statement now called CES 2.0.
CES vs CSAT vs NPS
All three ask a customer to rate something and they answer different questions.
- CES asks how hard it was. Best predictor of whether someone stays.
- CSAT asks how satisfied they were. Good for spotting a broken step.
- NPS asks whether they would recommend you. Good as a slow relationship measure.
CES is the one most teams under-use, partly because a high-effort experience does not generate complaints. People just quietly do less.
How to reduce customer effort
Find the steps people repeat. Repetition is the clearest effort signal there is. Anyone doing something three times is telling you it did not work the first two.
Remove the handoffs. Every transfer between channels, teams or tools adds effort the customer pays for.
Answer the next question before it is asked. Most follow-up contacts are predictable from the first one.
Ask why, not just how much. A low CES score with no comment tells you where to look and nothing about what to change.
CES for enterprise product teams
In a large product organisation, CES is most useful as a map. One overall number hides the detail, while a CES per touchpoint (onboarding, plan changes, the admin console, support) shows which teams own the effort and where it sits.
That only works if every team asks the same question on the same scale and reports it the same way. Agree on the wording once, run it at each touchpoint, and keep the comments attached to the scores. When one touchpoint drops, the product manager who owns it can show the reasons behind the drop, counted and grouped, instead of a single average.
Measuring CES with Usersnap
CES runs as a micro-survey at the end of the task you want to measure, inside the product rather than in a separate email. The free-text follow-up arrives with the score, in the same workspace as the rest of your feedback.
- Setup: start from the ready-made customer effort template and show the in-app micro-survey on the pages where the task happens. On plans that include API-event targeting, you can trigger it when the task is completed.
- Reading the comments: Sentiment Sensor, included on Professional plans and above (an add-on on Starter and Growth), tags each new comment with a topic and a sentiment, so you can see which parts of a task people mention most without reading every response.
- Asking your AI assistant: with the MCP connector, ChatGPT, Claude or Cursor can query your live workspace with your own permissions, for example "which topics come up most in this quarter's customer effort comments?" The connector sees new data, and Customer Success can index older responses.
- Fixing it: link the responses behind a theme to an opportunity on the Opportunities Board and score it for value and effort against the rest of the roadmap.
CES FAQ
How is Customer Effort Score calculated?
Add all responses and divide by the number of responses, giving an average on whatever scale you used. Some teams instead report the percentage choosing the top two options.
What is a good CES score?
On a seven-point scale, above 5 is generally good and above 6 strong. Your own trend on the same question matters more than the benchmark.
Is a higher CES score better?
On the ease scales used today, yes: a higher score means the task felt easier. The original 2010 question asked how much effort a task took, so on that version a lower score is better. Check which wording a benchmark used before you compare with it.
What is the difference between CES and CSAT?
CES measures how much effort something took. CSAT measures how satisfied someone was with it. A task can be satisfying and still exhausting, and the effort is what predicts churn.
When should you send a CES survey?
Straight after the task, while the person still remembers what it took.
Related terms
See how product teams measure effort at the end of a task and trace each low score to its reason.
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