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What Is CES? A Guide to Customer Effort Score

CES stands for Customer Effort Score. It measures how easy or difficult it is for a customer to complete a task, resolve an issue, or achieve a goal when interacting with a company.

While CSAT measures satisfaction and NPS measures loyalty, CES measures friction. That makes CES especially useful when you want to identify the parts of the customer journey where customers spend unnecessary time, energy, or patience.

At nps.today, we help companies measure NPS, CSAT, and CES, so customer feedback becomes more than a report. It becomes a practical foundation for improving experiences, reducing friction, and creating one common customer pulse.

What Does CES Mean?

CES is short for Customer Effort Score. It measures the level of effort a customer experiences when trying to complete a specific task or solve a specific problem.

A classic CES question is: How easy was it to resolve your issue?

Customers usually answer on a 1-5 or 1-7 scale. Some companies use a statement instead, such as: The company made it easy for me to handle my issue, with answers ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree.

How Is CES Measured?

CES is measured with a short survey sent immediately after a specific task or interaction. This could be after a support case, onboarding, purchase, delivery, login flow, complaint, return, or self-service task.

A strong CES process usually looks like this:

Choose the task or process where you want to measure customer effort.
Send a short CES question immediately after the experience.
Use a consistent scale, such as 1-5 or 1-7.
Add an open follow-up question so the customer can explain what made the experience easy or difficult.
Analyze responses by touchpoint, channel, team, product, or customer segment.
Use the insights to remove friction and improve the process.

CES Formula: How to Calculate Customer Effort Score

The most common way to calculate CES is to average all customer effort ratings.

CES = sum of all CES responses / number of respondents

If 100 customers answer on a 1-7 scale and the total score is 560, your CES score is 5.6.

Be careful with scale direction. On some scales, a high score means low effort. On others, a high score can mean high effort. The most important thing is to define the scale clearly and use it consistently.

What Is a Good CES Score?

A good CES score depends on the scale, industry, touchpoint, and customer expectations. On a 1-7 scale where 7 means very easy, a score above 5 often indicates a relatively easy experience, while scores below 4 usually point to friction that should be investigated.

The absolute score is only part of the story. CES is most valuable when you compare performance over time and identify which touchpoints create the most effort for customers.

A low CES score should always be paired with qualitative feedback. Otherwise, you know that the experience was difficult, but not why.

When Should You Use CES?

Use CES when you want to understand how easy or difficult it is for customers to get something done. CES is especially useful at touchpoints where friction can hurt loyalty, increase churn, or create extra pressure on customer service teams.

Common CES use cases include:

After a customer support or service interaction.
After a customer tries to solve something through self-service.
After checkout, payment, or ordering.
After onboarding or implementation.
After a complaint, return, or claims process.
After changing a subscription, account, agreement, or user details.
After using a digital feature where the user flow needs to be simple.

Why Is CES Important?

CES is important because customers often remember companies not for how much they were impressed, but for how easy or difficult it was to get things done. High customer effort can create frustration, more support contacts, lower loyalty, and higher churn risk.

Customer Effort Score helps you:

Identify friction in the customer journey.
Reduce unnecessary contact points and repeat inquiries.
Improve self-service, support, and digital flows.
Prioritize process improvements based on customer feedback.
Track whether changes actually make the experience easier.
Create better customer experiences without adding unnecessary complexity.

CES is powerful because it points directly to action. If customers say something is difficult, the business can investigate the process, identify the causes, and remove the barriers.

Examples of CES Survey Questions

A good CES question is short, specific, and connected to the task the customer just tried to complete.

How easy was it to resolve your issue?
How easy was it to complete your order?
How easy was it to find the information you needed?
How easy was it to contact us?
How easy was it to use our self-service solution?
To what extent did we make it easy for you to handle your request?

Useful follow-up questions include:

What made the experience easy or difficult?
What could we do to make the process easier?
Where did you experience the most friction?
May we contact you to follow up on your feedback?

How to Get Started with CES Surveys

If you want to start measuring CES, begin with the touchpoints where friction costs the most: support, onboarding, self-service, payment, complaints, returns, and customer account changes.

Map the customer journey and identify processes where customers may experience friction.
Choose 2-4 touchpoints where CES can create fast learning.
Define a consistent scale and make sure teams understand what the score means.
Combine the score with open-text comments.
Assign ownership for follow-up so feedback reaches the right team.
Measure continuously to see whether changes actually reduce customer effort.

Measure CES with nps.today

With nps.today, you can set up CES surveys across the customer journey and collect feedback in one operational overview. You can combine CES with NPS and CSAT, so your organization can measure loyalty, satisfaction, and friction together.

That creates a stronger foundation for decision-making because you do not only see whether customers are satisfied. You also see how easy it is for them to be your customer.

If you have questions about CES, survey design, or which customer experience metric to use, we are ready to help. nps.today can guide you through the setup and help you get more value from your customer feedback.

CES FAQ

What does CES mean?

CES means Customer Effort Score. It measures how easy or difficult it is for a customer to complete a task, solve a problem, or achieve a goal.

How do you calculate CES?

CES is often calculated as the average of all effort ratings: the sum of all CES responses divided by the number of respondents.

When should you use CES?

Use CES when you want to measure friction in a specific process, such as support, self-service, checkout, onboarding, or returns.

What is the difference between CES and CSAT?

CES measures how easy the experience was. CSAT measures how satisfied the customer was with the experience.

What is the difference between CES and NPS?

CES measures customer effort in a specific process. NPS measures overall loyalty and likelihood to recommend.

Can CES, CSAT, and NPS be used together?

Yes. Together, they provide a more complete view of the customer experience: friction, satisfaction, and loyalty.

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