Customer Effort Score Explained
This article explores Customer Effort Score (CES) - a simple but powerful way to measure how easy (or frustrating) it is for customers to get what they need from your business. It explains how CES differs from other metrics like Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS), why reducing effort leads to higher retention, satisfaction and conversions, and how to measure CES using surveys with either numeric or agreement-based scales.
What you’ll learn:
What CES is and how it compares to CSAT and NPS
Why reducing customer effort boosts loyalty and revenue
How to measure CES (and choose the right scale)
When to use CES across your customer journey
The difference between proactive and reactive CES surveys
How to interpret your results and spot trends
Practical ways to lower effort and improve customer experience
Let's dive into learning more about CES
People often say, "The customer is always right."
It might sound unusual to think of the customer as the one expending effort. After all, you're the one working tirelessly behind the scenes to provide a quality product or service. However, with the wealth of available options for customers today, ease of doing business has become a crucial factor in customer satisfaction and loyalty.
This is where the Customer Effort Score (CES) comes in. In this article, we'll explore the CES in depth. We'll discuss what it is, why it matters for your business, how to measure it, and practical ways to improve it.
Practical Tips for Improving Your Customer Effort Score
What is a customer effort score (CES)?
Customer Effort Score measures exactly what the name suggests – how much effort your customers need to expend when interacting with your business.
CES is a metric that measures how easy it is for customers to get things done with your company. It's usually based on a single survey question that asks customers to rate the ease of their experience. The idea is that the less effort a customer spends, the more likely they will keep returning.
While CES shares some similarities with other customer experience metrics, it differs. For instance, Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer loyalty and the likelihood of recommending a company to others. On the other hand, Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) gauges overall satisfaction with a product or service.
(Deeper dive: What is Customer Effort Score?)
Why CES Matters for Your Business
Customer Effort Score is one of those customer experience metrics many companies forget or simply ignore. However, lowering customer effort can significantly benefit your business, so paying attention to this metric is crucial.
Here’s why CES matters:
It helps you keep more customers.
It increases satisfaction.
It can improve your reputation.
It reduces the need for customer service.
It makes conversion easier and faster.
Increase Customer Retention and Satisfaction
Every business wants to keep customers and make them happy. If you satisfy customers, they come back. Returning customers increase their Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). You want them to keep spending and recommending you to others.
According to Harvard Business Review, 88% of customers who say they had an easy experience plan to spend more with that company.
Without CES, you might never know that your process could be smoother, which could cause customers to walk away. But if you can spot the tricky bits and improve upon them, you're on your way to building a loyal customer base. Make it easy and enjoyable to do business with you. Your customers will stay.
Improve Your Brand Reputation
Brand reputation is everything, especially if you have an online presence. A handful of negative reviews can easily sway a potential customer's opinion about your brand.
While CES doesn't directly impact your brand reputation, it's likely correlated. If your CES is unusually high, you'll likely see a few negative reviews crop up. Those frustrated enough with your business may be inclined to leave a bad review and tarnish your brand's image.
On the flip side, if you prioritise lowering customer effort and improving their experience, you'll likely see an increase in positive reviews and overall brand reputation.
Reduce the need for customer service
Many service calls and questions stem from confused and frustrated customers.
By lowering your CES, you're likely to see fewer of these types of inquiries. If you make your customer experience easier for customers to navigate independently, fewer people will reach out for help, freeing up your resources for other important tasks.
Increase conversion rates
The connection between ease and conversion is clear. Consider purchasing an online product and creating an account versus checking out as a guest. The latter option is much simpler and has a higher chance of converting.
The same concept can be applied to other industries, such as customer support or subscription services. A streamlined and effortless process leads to more conversions and, ultimately, more revenue.
How to measure Customer Effort Score
How do I calculate Customer Effort Score?
As you can see, the benefits of optimising your CES are hard to ignore. But to know where you stand and set goals for improvement, you need to know how to measure it.
Measuring CES is usually done through customer surveys that ask about their experience with a specific product or service. Our secure, UK-based survey platform makes it simple to create and distribute CES surveys whilst maintaining full compliance with data protection requirements.
The Numeric Scale Approach
One way to measure CES is with a numeric scale. That could be on a 1-7 scale, a 1-5 scale, or any other number that works for you.
You then ask customers to rate how much effort they had to put in to get what they needed. On a 1-7 scale, 1 might mean "very low effort", and 7 might mean "very high effort".
For example, you might ask, "On a scale of 1-7, how much effort did you have to put in to get your issue resolved today?" If most of your customers answer 5, 6, or 7, that's a sign you need to make some changes to reduce customer effort.
Agreement-Based Scale
Another approach is the agreement-based scale, also known as the Likert scale. It asks customers how much they agree with a statement. For instance, you might say: "It was easy to get my problem solved today." Then you give options like "Strongly Disagree", "Disagree", "Neutral", "Agree", and "Strongly Agree".
This approach can give you a clear picture of how customers perceive the effort involved in dealing with your company.
When to Use CES in Your Customer Journey
When you use the CES metric will heavily depend on your business and customer journey. For instance, a company selling a regular consumable product might use CES after a customer has made a purchase to gauge their satisfaction and likelihood of repurchasing.
On the other hand, a company selling a high-ticket item or service may use CES at various touchpoints throughout the customer journey to identify pain points and improve the overall experience.
Did they understand the explainer video? CES. Did they have a smooth onboarding process? CES. Did they have a positive experience with customer support? CES.
In general, there are a few common touchpoints where you want to conduct a CES survey:
Post-support interaction
Checkout process
Post-purchase
New feature/product launch
Free trial ending
Proactive versusvs reactive CES
There are two main ways to do CES surveys: proactive and reactive.
Proactive CES surveys are sent out at specific times or touchpoints. You're expecting the customer to have an issue or be unhappy, so you're getting ahead of it by asking for feedback.
Reactive CES surveys are sent out after something specific happens, like after a customer talks to support or buys something. This lets you get feedback right away and fix any problems quickly. The difference is this one is usually triggered by something that would lead you to believe there was an issue.
Interpreting customer effort score results
However, the score requires context to be truly valuable. A single score from one customer doesn't tell you much, so it's important to look at the overall trend.
You can compare your data to previous time periods to see if things are getting better or worse. You can also look at the data by different groups, like age or how people use your product, to spot patterns and areas where you can improve.
What is a good customer effort score?
A “good” Customer Effort Score is one that sits in the top bands of your chosen scale.
It also depends on the scale you use. If you use a 5-point scale, a score of 4 might be pretty good. But if you use a 7-point scale, that score might be average.
So, it's best to set your own benchmark and track your improvement over time rather than comparing your score to others in your industry.
(Deeper dive: What Is a Good Customer Effort Score?)
What is the 5-point effort scale?
The 5-point effort scale asks customers to pick one of five options:
A lot of effort
Some effort
Neutral
Little effort
Very little effort
Scores of 4 or 5 mean the experience felt easy.
Reduce customer friction through feedback
Effective customer feedback helps you boost customer contentment by better understanding what customers love, like or even dislike about their interactions with your business, service or products. But to understand what is working and not, you need an effective survey solution. Learn more about our Customer Experience Software.
Mo’s career spans over 20 years in tech and business leadership. As co founder of SmartSurvey, he brings a customer-first mindset, grounded in real-world experience helping organisations turn feedback into action. He’s passionate about making survey tools accessible, secure and brilliantly useful whether you're a small team or a government department.
