What Is CES (Customer Effort Score)?
Customer Effort Score measures how easy or difficult it was for a customer to accomplish a task with your product or team, typically on a 1-7 scale.
CES is built on a simple insight: customers are more loyal to companies that make things easy. The survey asks "How easy was it to [accomplish task]?" on a 1-7 scale, where 1 is Very Difficult and 7 is Very Easy. CES predicts retention better than CSAT in many studies because effort directly drives frustration and switching intent.
CES is typically deployed after specific interactions: resolving a support ticket, completing a setup step, finding information in documentation, or navigating a product workflow. It measures the friction in your customer experience rather than satisfaction or loyalty.
Why Effort Matters
High-effort experiences are the top driver of customer disloyalty. Research by CEB (now Gartner) found that reducing effort has 4x more impact on loyalty than delighting customers. Customers do not need to be wowed. They need things to work without friction.
For CS teams, CES reveals where your processes create unnecessary burden. If customers report high effort when submitting feature requests, maybe the process needs simplification. If onboarding CES is low (high effort), the setup workflow may have too many manual steps.
Using CES to Improve CS Operations
Deploy CES at friction-prone moments: after support interactions, after onboarding milestones, after self-serve actions (updating billing, managing users), and after product configuration changes. Look for patterns in low-CES responses. If 40% of low-CES scores come from integration setup, that is where investment in automation or documentation will have the most impact.
CES is especially useful for tech-touch and low-touch segments where customers must self-serve many tasks. High effort in self-serve workflows drives churn in segments where you do not have a CSM to smooth over the friction. Tracking and reducing effort for these segments directly improves retention.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does CES measure?
CES measures how easy or difficult it was for a customer to accomplish a specific task. It captures the friction in your customer experience, which research shows is a strong predictor of loyalty and churn.
How is CES different from CSAT and NPS?
CES measures effort (was this easy?). CSAT measures satisfaction (were you happy?). NPS measures loyalty (would you recommend us?). CES is the most tactical of the three, focused on specific process friction.
What is a good CES score?
On a 1-7 scale, an average CES above 5.5 indicates low-effort experiences. Below 4.0 signals significant friction. The goal is for the vast majority of customers to rate their experience as easy (6-7).