The customer effort score (CES) measures consumer satisfaction levels by quantifying how easy customers find it to interact with your brand. They're normally deployed directly after an interaction with customer support, immediately after purchase or subscription or at quarterly intervals.
A CES survey asks a single, simple question to measure how easy or hard it was to perform an action. Consumers choose from multiple choice answers, ranging from very difficult to very easy. If there are lots of negative answers, you should focus on making it easier for customers to interact with your company.
CES is useful for following a specific touchpoint or transaction. It's also a useful tool for prioritizing customer journey improvements.
For example, you might have a CES survey at key points along the journey... If payment process is showing a low CES, that is an important thing to know. It's also good for self-service options like finding answers in a knowledge base or solving an issue.
When you have a high-effort service interaction, customer loyalty can take a hit. If you’re looking to streamline specific customer interactions and make a product or service more user-friendly, CES should be your go-to metric.
Measuring CES
As a measure of customer effort, CES is useful to calculate the likelihood of customer retention and business growth. In general, customers want to expend the least amount of effort to complete a task or solve a problem: if you’re making them work too hard, there is a good chance they will go to a competitor next time. This metric is derived from a customer satisfaction survey that measures a product or service’s ease of use to customers. A Customer Effort Score reflects the amount of effort a customer had to exert to use a product or service, find the information they needed, or get an issue resolved.
Customers are asked to respond to a statement like “[Name of the organization] made it easy for me to handle [name of issue]” with a 1-5 or 1-7 scale rating, where 1: strongly disagree and 5 or 7: strongly agree. The less effort required, the better the CES—and, arguably, the higher the customer satisfaction.
CES data is collected by surveying customers in real-time after a single action or interaction. Customers are typically asked to rate the ease of their experience through a numerical 1-5 or 1-7 scale, but more creative and visual solutions can include an emoticon anger-to-happiness scale. The collected answers are then averaged to give an idea of how much effort a certain process requires of customers.
There is no universal benchmark for a good CES because different ranges are used to measure answers: some businesses measure using a 1-5 scale, others 1-7, and others just use happy and sad faces and dispense of numbers altogether. Regardless, as a general principle: the higher the CES, the better. A high CES score means that your company provides an effortless experience for customers, while a low CES means that people find your processes arduous or your customer support ineffective—and you need to make improvements or risk losing customers
The drawback of CES is that the score is tightly focused on evaluating a single process or customer interaction, so it doesn’t give a full picture of the entire customer experience—which is why CES is used in tandem with NPS and CSAT
CES Benefits
Improve brand experiences for customers and prospects
Determine gaps in customer experience programs
Establish new methods for customers to accomplish tasks
Demonstrate a willingness to improve customer experiences
Compare UX efforts to competitors
Reduce customer service costs
CES Limitations
Lacks the ability to process the emotional context of a customer's interaction
Focuses on specific interactions or transitions and therefore does not necessarily reflect the customer's overall satisfaction
May have limited predictive power for long-term customer behavior due to its focus on single interactions
Its narrow focus means it might overlook broader issues affecting customer satisfaction, like product quality or price competitiveness.
Example CES questions
On a scale from 1-7, how easy was it to interact with our product/service?
On a scale of "Very Difficult" to "Very Easy," how would you rate your recent interaction with our customer service team?
How would you rate the ease of use of our product/service on a scale from 1-5?
Was it easy to find the information you were looking for?
Did you find it easy to complete your task on our platform?
How much effort did you personally have to put forth to resolve your issue with our product/service?
On a scale from "Strongly Disagree" to "Strongly Agree," please respond to this statement: The software made it easy for me to complete my task.