Customer Effort Score (CES)
Definition
Customer Effort Score (CES)
Customer Effort Score (CES) is a single question metric that measures how hard a customer had to work to finish a task with your business. Low effort predicts loyalty better than satisfaction alone, so CES sits at the heart of most service scorecards.
The metric asks one question: “How easy did we make it for you to handle your issue?” Customers answer on a 5- or 7-point scale, and you take the average. That number is your CES.
CEB researchers, now part of Gartner, built CES in 2010. Their Harvard Business Review article argued that cutting effort beats delighting buyers, and it reset the Customer Experience (CX) playbook.
Offshore support teams took CES seriously once clients demanded measurable quality, and offshore outsourcing remains a booming sector because operators report CES next to cost savings.
Key takeaways
- CES uses one question to measure how easy it was for a customer to finish a task.
- CEB, now part of Gartner, created the metric in 2010, and Harvard Business Review published the case in its July–August 2010 issue.
- A 5- or 7-point scale is standard: above 5.5 on the 7-point scale is healthy, and 4.0 on a 5-point Likert.
- Send CES straight after a defined event, inside 24 hours: a ticket close, a checkout, or a returns request.
- CES predicts loyalty better than Customer Satisfaction Rating (CSAT) and complements Net Promoter Score (NPS).
How it works
CES is the average response to one agreement question, usually “The company made it easy for me to handle my issue”, scored on a 5- or 7-point Likert scale. A higher average means less customer effort.
You survey customers right after the event — a chat closes, an order ships, a return finishes. The window matters, because memory of effort fades fast, so send inside 24 hours.
Three response formats cover most programs, and two lighter ones cover mobile. Pick one, publish the healthy band with it, and never mix scales inside a single report.
| Scale | Question wording | Score direction | Healthy band |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5-point Likert | “How easy was it to solve your problem today?” | Higher = easier | 4.0 or above |
| 7-point agree | “The company made it easy to handle my issue” | Higher = less effort | 5.5 healthy, 6.0 elite |
| CES 3.0 numeric | “On a scale of 1 to 7, how much effort did it take?” | Lower = less effort | 2.5 or below, the 5.5 threshold inverted |
| 3-point ease | “Was that easy, neutral, or hard?” | Higher = easier | share picking “easy”, not an average |
| Emoji tap | “Tap the face that matches how easy that was” | Higher = easier | your own rolling baseline |
According to a Qualtrics analysis of CES, the 2010 CEB research found 96% of high-effort service interactions made customers more disloyal.
Only 9% of low-effort interactions did the same. That gap of 87 percentage points, 96 minus 9, is why effort became a loyalty metric rather than a service one.
The same Qualtrics explainer notes that more than 50 percent of online interactions now happen on mobile devices. Your CES prompt has to load and submit in a couple of taps, or you only hear from desktop users.
Sample size matters as much as scale choice. On thin ticket volumes, a handful of angry responses can swing a weekly average by half a point, so most teams report monthly and treat the weekly figure as a tripwire.
Most teams also pair CES with a free-text follow-up: “What made it hard?” That comment field is where the fix lives — not in the average score.
Watch for score inflation on very short interactions. A one-click FAQ view will always beat a complex refund on effort ratings, so segment CES by interaction complexity before you set targets.
Examples
Companies use CES most heavily in support, self-service, and checkout flows. The survey fires right after the event, and the ops team investigates any score below 5 on the 7-point scale before it turns into a churn signal.
Amazon returns (2023). After a return closes, Amazon fires a one-question CES prompt asking how easy the process was. Feedback drops into the returns operations dashboard for weekly review, and repeat offenders trigger a category-level product audit.
HSBC UK digital banking (2024). HSBC uses a 5-point CES prompt after in-app transfers and card requests. Scores under 4 route to a user experience review queue instead of a support agent, which keeps product fixes fast.
Shopify merchant support (2024). Every closed support ticket triggers a CES survey. Shopify credits the metric with routing thousands of workflow issues back to product engineers each quarter.
Zappos checkout (2022 refresh). The retailer switched from CSAT to CES on its checkout survey after finding that ease of use predicted repeat orders more reliably than post-purchase happiness ratings.
Outsourced support teams report CES weekly to the client, next to average handle time and first-contact resolution. Providers in Manila and Cebu now quote it in pitch decks.
The number becomes a shared KPI — a slide of 0.3 points week over week is usually enough to trigger a call review and a coaching cycle for the agents involved.
Related terms
CES lives in a family of customer experience metrics, and each one measures a different slice of the relationship. Use these alongside CES rather than instead of it, from single transactions through to long run loyalty.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): likelihood to recommend on a 0 to 10 scale, weighted toward long run loyalty.
- Customer Satisfaction Rating (CSAT): event level happiness, measured at the same touchpoint as CES.
- Customer Experience (CX): the umbrella discipline every CES score plugs into.
- Customer Journey: the full path along which CES measures friction.
- Customer Retention: the downstream outcome that low effort predicts.
- Customer Service: the team most CES surveys end up evaluating.
- Call Center: the operational unit where CES triggered coaching lands.
FAQ
What is a good customer effort score?
On the 7-point CEB scale, an average above 5.5 is strong and above 6.0 is elite. On a 5-point Likert, aim for 4.0 or higher. Trend direction matters more than the absolute number, especially in a program’s first two quarters.
When should you send a CES survey?
Send it right after a discrete event: a chat closes, a purchase completes, a return finishes, or a self-service article gets read. A 24-hour window keeps the memory of the interaction accurate, and same-session prompts do even better on mobile.
CES vs NPS vs CSAT — which one wins?
None wins alone, because CES measures transactional ease, CSAT measures event level happiness, and NPS measures long run loyalty. Mature CX programs track all three and correlate the deltas instead of picking a favourite.
Does CES apply outside customer support?
Yes. Teams run it on onboarding, checkout, and self-serve knowledge bases. Forrester’s customer experience blog, home of its 2026 Total Experience Score rankings, tracks CES beyond support.
What are the biggest CES pitfalls?
Two dominate: surveying too late, once the memory of the effort has decayed, and treating one average as the whole story instead of segmenting by channel, agent, and issue type.
Ready to build a CES program with offshore support?
Compare vetted providers in Outsource Accelerator’s outsourcing hubs, shortlist source partners by capability and location, then see where CES sits in the delivery model in the ultimate guide to outsourcing.
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