Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how easy it was for a customer to get something done.
Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how easy it was for a customer to get something done: resolve an issue, complete a purchase, set up an account. The standard format asks customers to rate agreement with a statement like “The company made it easy to handle my request,” usually on a 1 to 7 scale where 7 is strongly agree. The premise, drawn from research on service interactions, is that reducing effort predicts loyalty more reliably than delighting customers does. 1
How CES is measured
Most teams report CES one of two ways. The first is a simple average of all responses, so a CES of 5.8 on a 7-point scale. The second is a top-box percentage, the share of respondents choosing 5, 6, or 7. As with any survey metric, the method matters less than applying it consistently, because the value is in the trend.
Where you ask shapes what you learn. CES belongs immediately after an effort-bearing moment:
- 1
after a support interaction resolves
- 2
after onboarding or first setup completes
- 3
after a self-service task, like changing a payment method
- 4
after a return, cancellation, or account recovery flow
A low score on any of these points at friction in a specific journey, which is precisely what makes CES more actionable than broader satisfaction measures. The question is narrow on purpose.
Why effort is worth measuring
The case for CES rests on an asymmetry: effortful experiences drive disloyalty more strongly than pleasant experiences drive loyalty. 1 A customer who struggled through four contacts to fix a billing error remembers the struggle long after the error is fixed. High-effort journeys also generate repeat support contacts, so effort shows up in operating cost, not just sentiment.
CES has boundaries. It is transaction-scoped, so it says nothing about overall brand health; pair it with a relational measure for that. It also inherits the standard survey weaknesses of low response rates and self-selection. And a good average can conceal a brutal tail: a 6.1 mean CES can coexist with ten percent of customers having a terrible time, which is why the distribution and the open comments deserve a look, not just the mean.
A worked example
A banking app adds CES to the end of its account recovery flow and sees a mean of 4.2, well below other journeys. The comments cluster around one step: the identity document upload fails silently on certain phones, forcing customers to restart. Session data confirms the drop-off at that step. After the upload component is rebuilt, CES on the flow climbs above 6 and, notably, support contacts about account recovery fall by a third. The team found the issue faster because the survey was scoped to a single journey rather than the whole app.
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FAQ
The score points at the friction; the comments name it
The score points at the friction; the open comments name it. See how teams read effort and satisfaction verbatims at scale in the best NPS, CSAT, and verbatim analysis tools.
Sources 1 references
Dixon, Matthew, Karen Freeman, and Nicholas Toman, "Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers." Harvard Business Review, July–August 2010. hbr.org/2010/07/stop-trying-to-delight-your-customers. Accessed August 2026.