What is CES (Customer Effort Score)?

Customer effort score (CES) is a one-question survey metric that asks customers how much effort it took to get something done, such as resolving a support issue, so service and success teams can find the friction that drives customers away.

At a glance

• CES comes from a 2010 Harvard Business Review article, “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers”, by Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman and Nicholas Toman of CEB (now part of Gartner).
• The original question: “How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?”
• The original scale ran from 1 (very low effort) to 5 (very high effort), so a lower score was better.
• It’s measured right after a specific interaction, not about the relationship as a whole.
• It sits next to CSAT and NPS, and answers a different question.

Where CES comes from

CEB’s Customer Contact Council surveyed more than 75,000 B2C and B2B customers over three years about phone and self-service interactions. It found that going above and beyond made customers only slightly more loyal than simply solving their problem, while a hard experience did real damage.

When the researchers compared metrics, CSAT was a poor predictor of loyalty, NPS did better, and CES predicted repurchase and increased spending best in service interactions. Of customers who reported low effort, 94% said they intended to buy again. Of those who struggled, 81% said they’d speak negatively about the company.

How to measure CES

Send the single question straight after the interaction you want to measure: a support ticket closing, an onboarding step, a billing change. Report the average score, or the share of responses at the low-effort end, and keep the same scale every time so you can compare months.

Example (illustrative): 200 customers answer after a support ticket closes, and the average is 2.1 on the 1 to 5 effort scale. Accounts whose tickets were transferred twice average 3.4. That gap tells you where to look first.

What drives high effort

The HBR research named the usual causes. Most customers reported at least one of them:

• contacting the company more than once to fix one issue (62%)
• being transferred (59%)
• switching from the website to the phone (57%)
• having to explain the issue again (56%)

Common CES mistakes

• Mixing up the scale direction. On the original scale, high is bad. If your survey uses a scale where high means easy, say so on every report so nobody reads it backwards.
• Asking about the whole relationship. CES works because it’s tied to one interaction. Use NPS for the relationship.
• Measuring only first-contact resolution. The authors suggest tracking repeat contacts within 7 to 14 days, which catches the follow-up issues first-contact resolution misses.
• Collecting scores nobody acts on. A high-effort response is a reason to call that customer back.

How CES shows up in a revenue system

Effort shows up in the work after the sale: support queues, onboarding steps, billing questions. At AtoB, we run the customer-facing side alongside sales, covering support, collections, onboarding and QA. Read how the AtoB customer team runs.

Terms that sit next to CES

CES is often one input to a customer health score, and high effort early on usually shows up later in churn rate. Reducing effort during onboarding is one of the fastest ways to improve time to value.