Customer Effort Score (CES): What is it and how to use it

Providing an effortless customer experience (CX) is critical for growing satisfaction, loyalty, and referrals. However, organizations cannot systematically improve CX without measuring ease and friction at each touchpoint along the customer journey. 

Enter the Customer Effort Score (CES). This metric tracks the level of effort a customer has exerted to achieve a particular goal, from checking out online to locating information on your website to resolving support cases.

Customer Effort Score (CES) is a metric that measures the relative effort it takes a customer to complete a task or interaction with a company or product. CES will provide clear insight into how easy it is to interact with your products, services, and site. The easier a task is to complete, the less friction a customer feels, and the more satisfied they become. 

SurveyMonkey research shows that 91% of consumers will likely recommend a company after a positive, low-effort experience. With that in mind, improving your CES score can drive higher customer satisfaction and improved customer loyalty—as well as word-of-mouth marketing.

Sending out CES surveys for different stages of the CX process allows you to monitor the customer journey. Your business can use these insights as a catalyst for making enhancements to the customer experience. This process allows you to continually optimize operations that are most prone to friction before customer effort escalates and erodes loyalty.

A CES survey is usually a short survey with a core customer effort question, plus  a few follow-up questions. These follow up questions give you an opportunity to collect some context around the CES question, but do not impact your score. Here’s an example of what a CES survey question might look like: 

“[Your company] makes it easy for me to handle my issue.” 

CES was developed to address the hypothesis that the amount of effort required of a customer could have a big impact on customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.  A team of researchers at the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) consulting firm first proposed the Customer Effort Score in 2010. They posited that exceeding customer expectations wasn’t actually the most effective way of enhancing customer loyalty. On the contrary, repeated frictionless experiences with a business drives loyalty.

For example, high-effort customer interactions, like having to switch channels, repeat information, and being transferred to a different support agent all create friction in your customer service process. In fact, in a recent SurveyMonkey study, over a third (35%) of consumers said being transferred during a CX interaction was one of their top three frustrations.  A customer that repeatedly experiences friction with your business will develop a negative perception of your business, increasing the likelihood of customer churn.

The Customer Effort Score is a response to these findings, allowing businesses to determine which touchpoints could use some streamlining. 

One of the most effective aspects of the Customer Effort Score is that you can survey almost any customer touchpoint. By slightly changing the CES question, you can gather information on different processes in your business.

Here are a few CES question examples:

These questions all generate data that you can then use to calculate your customer effort score. But, each of them focuses on a different part of the customer experience, ranging across support conversations, check-outs, onboarding, and website navigation.

The Customer Effort Score works best as a way for customers to give immediate feedback to your company. Asking a customer how their experience was with customer support a month after their interaction would likely reduce response rates, as customers either won’t remember or won’t care enough to recall. 

Here are scenarios of when to use Customer Effort Score best:

The CES calculation is fairly simple. To calculate CES, take the total sum of all of your responses and then divide by the number of total responses. 

Let’s say that 100 people replied to your CES survey. They could have selected an answer on a scale of 1-10. The total sum of all responses came to 750. By dividing 750/100, we get a final CES score of 7.5. This means that on a scale of 1-10, your average CES is 7.5.

Now that you understand how to measure customer effort scores, let’s explore what a good, average, and bad score looks like.

Unlike a Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) survey, there is no one-size-fits-all standard benchmark for the Customer Effort Score. That’s because companies can use a different number of response choices to a question. 

A 6 CES on a scale of 1-7 would be great, but a 6 on a scale of 1-10 could suggest your customers are frustrated with your processes.

However, a general concept to determine what a good Customer Effort Score to follow is aiming for the top 20% of the scale. On a scale of 1-10, that means that anything over 8 is a good CES score. On a scale of 1-7, you’re looking at 5.6 and upward. 

A bad CES score would be anything that’s on the lower end of the spectrum. Anything under 5 on a 1-10 scale could signal you need to majority enhance your processes.

Your Customer Effort Score places a quantifiable value on how much effort your customer exerts when interacting with your business.

By monitoring your CES over time and implementing changes to streamline your customer experience, your customers will feel less frustrated with your brand.

With less frustration comes:

Let’s break down these benefits of CES further. 

Customer experience (CX) shapes overall satisfaction with your business, which directly feeds customer loyalty. By using the insights from Customer Effort Scores to remove obstacles, you can build a more frictionless customer journey that delights.

Running a robust customer feedback program centered around CES provides the insights necessary to guide business improvements that make an impact. 

When you include CES in a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program, you’re creating a built-in feedback loop that can accelerate support solutions and optimize processes.

Satisfied customers naturally repurchase, renew contracts, and refer others to your business.  The opposite also holds true—disappointed customers abandon brands that test their patience. 

Customer retention rests on the cumulative trust formed through friction-free journeys.

According to recent research, 59% of consumers who trust a brand are more likely to buy a new product that the business introduces, and 67% are more likely to stay local and recommend it to others. 

By addressing pain points and making processes more customer-friendly, businesses can create an environment that encourages customers to continue their relationship with your business. 

When channeled proactively, CES insights help organizations build customer trust and retention by eliminating unnecessary burdens at the outset rather than costly post-churn corrections.

Customers who love your brand often become your biggest supporters. They are more likely to buy from your business repeatedly and recommend your business to family and friends.

Consumers are likely to trust recommendations from people they know above all other forms of marketing. This especially rings true if your business doesn’t have a recognizable brand name. 

By remedying customer pain points swiftly, you’ll create brand loyalty that can translate into word-of-mouth recommendations.

Your business should use its CES to find opportunities for improvement. By making small improvements to each customer touchpoint, you provide the best customer service and overall experience possible. 

Here are some steps to follow when using the CES metric.

To effectively create CES surveys, your business should identify customer pain points in their journey. Your main goal will be streamlining the customer’s process of interacting with your business. To do this, you need to understand where these connection points occur. 

From there, you can set clear objectives for your survey, such as determining CES during or after different customer touchpoints, evaluating their causes, and mitigating them in the future.

Your business can format the customer effort question as a simple multiple-choice question. We also recommend asking a follow-up, open-ended question that asks a customer why they gave that rating.

For example:

From there, you can send:

When you decide it’s time to send the survey, you have several options to choose from. A customer support rep can share a link to the survey, or you can send it to several customers at the same time via email or embed it on your website.

It’s a good idea to keep the survey short and sweet. Asking too many questions could result in a customer clicking off your survey before responding. Our two expertly-written CES questions work wonders—find them in our Customer Effort Score survey template.

You may be wondering when the optimal time is to assess customer scores during the customer management process. The best practice is to measure them frequently across the customer journey, rather than just once. 

The best way to pinpoint any obstacles in the customer experience is to ask customer effort questions at various points of engagement. Try to ask customer effort questions immediately after these events to collect timely, actionable feedback.

Here are some customer touchpoints to monitor with CES:

These will help you to gain a comprehensive understanding of how your company supports your customers over various parts of their journey.

One of the most important aspects of utilizing CES is to improve customer-facing processes. Start by looking at low numbers, carefully reading through their explanations. If you notice recurring friction areas, you have a clear objective to improve and implement change. 

Over time, this strategy will help to remedy negative experiences with your business, boosting your CES score. 

Related reading: The ultimate guide to running a customer feedback program.

Customer feedback unlocks the ability to identify areas where your customer service team may be underperforming. 

For example, a common complaint for many businesses is that customer support takes too long to solve a customer’s problem. To remedy this, you could introduce more customer service training modules for your team to improve their skills and find solutions more rapidly. 

Another solution may be to introduce response time limits to your customer service team. This could also be a sign to hire one or two more customer support agents to reduce response time.

Send out Customer Effort Score surveys regularly throughout the customer journey to create a steady stream of actionable CES data for optimizing touchpoints. This approach allows you to incrementally enhance processes over time. 

As your organization makes ongoing improvements guided by CES insights, you’ll begin to see this metric improve. In parallel with this increase in CES, you will notice the aforementioned benefits, like higher customer satisfaction and reduced customer churn.

While CES provides key insights into the ease of customer interactions, two other vital metrics should be on your radar: Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT). Each measurement lens offers distinct yet complementary value.

Here’s what each of these customer experience metrics measures:

Let’s explore when to best use each of these metrics to measure customer experience.

As discussed previously, CES is best used to measure customer effort. It explores how easy you make the act of solving problems, purchasing products, and interacting with your business. CES primarily focuses on minimizing customer effort and maximizing their satisfaction.

A Net Promoter Score survey evaluates customer loyalty to a brand. Businesses can track this metric by inquiring about the likelihood of customers recommending your brand, products, or services to others. 

Beyond this, NPS helps distinguish between loyal brand advocates and customers who may switch to competitors. 

Related reading: How to use NPS surveys to create the best customer experience.

CSAT measures customer satisfaction by seeking customers’ overall ratings on your business, an interaction, or a product or service. 

This score helps you evaluate and improve individual touchpoints across the customer journey. Targeting one touchpoint per assessment and monitoring advancements within that area will ensure you’re maximizing the value of CSAT. 

Related reading: The ultimate guide to Customer Satisfaction Score.

Simply measuring your Customer Effort Score provides limited value without commitment to act. Transformational change requires closing the loop between assessing journey pain points and addressing those areas through better-designed processes. 

The key is applying CES operationally, creating a steady cadence to gather and analyze customer feedback. Only then can you implement changes and optimize the customer experience when it's needed the most. 

Streamline your customer experience by getting started with the SurveyMonkey CES template.

Learn more about how SurveyMonkey can help to improve your customer experience today.

NPS, Net Promoter & Net Promoter Score are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld.