Customer effort score
May 2025
Customers have problems, and they want your product to solve them. Ideally, in a way that requires low effort on their side. Otherwise, they’re likely to find a different solution.
The first step towards offering low-effort experiences is having a way to measure your customer effort level. That’s where the customer effort score, often referred to as CES, comes in.
With that in mind, let’s get on with it!
What is CES
Customer effort score is a metric created to help you understand the amount of effort it takes a customer to perform a particular task.
It’s a self reported measure, so it’s subjective, and you usually gather the data via a survey or analysing impressions in your interactions with your customers.
When asked in a survey, it’s usually presented as a five or seven point Likert scale, where the low range is considered a disagree score, and the high range is considered an agree score. For the seven point scale, the low range is 1 to 4, and the high range is 4 to 7. For a five point scale, the low range is 1 to 3, and the high range is 4 to 5.
Based on the survey data, you calculate your CES by dividing the total number of respondents who answered in agreement, by the total number of respondents and use a percentage figure.
Why is CES effective
Some analysis have found a correlation between customer effort and customer loyalty, where loyalty is the likelihood of continued purchases, increased purchases, and positive feedback about the organisation.
This is the main reason for creating the CES, to have a metric that reflects the level of effort a customer puts when they need to get a problem solved.
In other words, by using CES you can optimise for low-effort experiences, allowing your customers to achieve their goals with your product easily.
But there is more! Another good reason to have a high CES, is that when the customer effort is lower, the cost to serve is also lower. So there is also a cost-effective side effect.
How can you implement CES
To implement CES, you need to survey your customers. This is usually done by asking one question in the form of “[Organisation] made it easy for me to handle [my issue]” with a disagree-agree Likert scale, as you read previously.
The first of the two customizable parts in the survey is straightforward. It’s just the name of your organisation.
The second is a bit trickier. It relates to the experience you want to measure. For this particular bit, it’s important to select the issue that you think is the most valuable to you while being specific enough to be actionable. That’s where you have to think hard. Where do you want to put your focus? From your current feedback, where do you think customers are experiencing the highest friction?
Whatever it is, once you decide on it, you just need to survey your customers and compile their answers.
How to analyse the results
Once you get answers from the surveys, calculating the CES is simple. Get the total number of responses for the agree range. Then, divide that number by the total number of responses and convert the result to a percentage.
The reason to take the agree answers is because moving from disagree to agree has the most significant impact in improving loyalty, which is one of the main benefits of using the CES. This means that the higher your CES, the better.
Moving customers from a low agree answer to a high agree answer is good too, but it’s less important.
Conclusions
When you put all this information together, using the CES shows as a good, simple, and minimally intrusive approach to improving customer loyalty and building experiences that can give you an advantage over competitors.
That’s all!