Customer Effort Score (CES): How to Calculate It, Survey Questions and Free Calculator

Customers rarely leave because a company failed to amaze them. They leave because getting something simple done was harder than it should have been: transferred three times, asked to repeat the same details, sent from chat to email to phone. Customer Effort Score puts a number on that friction.

This guide explains what CES is and where it comes from, the difference between CES 1.0 and CES 2.0, how to calculate your score (with a free calculator), survey questions you can use, when to ask, what a good score means, how to analyse the comments, how to reduce effort, and how CES compares with CSAT and NPS.

What is Customer Effort Score (CES)?

Customer Effort Score is a customer experience metric that measures how easy it was for customers to use your product or service, resolve an issue or complete a task. Customers answer one question right after the interaction:

> "[Company] made it easy for me to handle my issue."

Like CSAT, CES is a transactional metric: it measures one moment, not the whole relationship. Where CSAT asks how satisfied customers were, CES asks how easy it was. For loyalty to the brand as a whole, use Net Promoter Score.

Where CES comes from

Customer Effort Score was introduced in 2010 by the Corporate Executive Board (CEB, now part of Gartner) in the Harvard Business Review article "Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers" by Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman and Nicholas Toman. Over three years, CEB surveyed more than 75,000 customers about recent service interactions over the phone and in self-service channels such as the web, chat and email.

What CEB reported:

• Exceeding customer expectations during service made little difference to loyalty. Reducing effort did.
• Of customers who reported low effort, 94% intended to buy again, 88% said they would spend more and only 1% said they would speak negatively about the company.
• Of customers who had a hard time solving their problem, 81% intended to spread negative word of mouth.
• Customers were four times more likely to leave a service interaction disloyal than loyal.
• In CEB's analysis, CES predicted loyalty better than customer satisfaction or the Net Promoter Score.

CEB later expanded the research in the book The Effortless Experience (Dixon, Toman and DeLisi, 2013). One figure from that work is quoted in almost every article about CES: 96% of customers with a high-effort service interaction became more disloyal, compared with 9% of customers who had a low-effort experience.

Treat these as findings from CEB's research on service interactions, not as forecasts for your own business. They explain why effort matters; your own data will tell you how much it matters for your customers.

CES 1.0 vs CES 2.0

There are two versions of the CES question, and you will see both in articles and survey tools.

CEB replaced the original question in 2013. In its words, customers interpreted the first version inconsistently: some misread the reversed scale (where 1 is good), some felt the question asked whether they had tried hard enough themselves, and the word "effort" did not translate neatly into every language. That also made comparisons between companies difficult.

CEB tested a range of effort questions with nearly 50,000 customers across companies, industries and regions and chose the agreement statement. It reported that CES 2.0 was 1.8 times more predictive of customer loyalty than CSAT and two times more predictive than NPS, and that it held up across 35 companies and 11 languages.

Use CES 2.0 unless you need to compare with old CES 1.0 data. Asking about "easy" instead of "effort" is clearer for customers and easier to translate.

How to calculate Customer Effort Score

The most common method reports the share of customers who agree that the interaction was easy, the answers 5, 6 and 7 on the 7-point scale:

Both are used. The share method is easier to explain ("75% of customers found it easy") and matches CEB's own advice: it recommended moving customers to at least a 5 ("somewhat agree"), because in its data moving a customer from 1 to 5 raised loyalty by 22%, while moving from 5 to 7 added only 2%. Whichever method you choose, use the same one every time and say which one you report.

Worked example

After support cases closed last week, 100 customers answered the CES question:

So 75% of customers agreed the company made it easy to handle their issue, and the average score was 5.3 out of 7.

Free CES calculator

Pick your scale, enter how many customers chose each answer and the calculator shows your Customer Effort Score, the average and the number of responses. It also works with the 1–5 agreement scale and with the original 1–5 effort scale.

CES in a spreadsheet

If your scores are in column A (rows 2 to 101) on the 7-point scale:

Format the first cell as a percentage.

CES survey questions

The core question stays the same; only the task changes. Pick the one that matches the moment you measure:

Customer support - "[Company] made it easy for me to handle my issue." - "It was easy to get my problem solved today." - "I got the answer I needed without having to contact you again."

Purchase and checkout - "It was easy to find what I was looking for." - "Completing my purchase was easy." - "It was easy to choose the right plan or product."

Onboarding and setup - "It was easy to set up [product]." - "It was easy to get started with [product]."

Self-service and help content - "It was easy to find the answer in the help center." - "The app made it easy to change my booking."

Returns, billing and account changes - "Returning my order was easy." - "It was easy to update my payment details." - "It was easy to cancel or change my subscription."

Always add an open question

The rating tells you how easy it was; the comment tells you why. Follow every CES question with one open question:

• "What made it easy or difficult?"
• "What is one thing we could have made easier?"

Let customers answer in their own words instead of choosing from a list. The comments show you friction you did not know about. Keep the rest of the survey short: one rating, one open question and, at most, one question about a specific factor such as the agent's knowledge.

When and where to send a CES survey

Timing. Send the survey right after the interaction you want to measure, while it is fresh: when a support case closes, after a purchase, at the end of onboarding, after a return or an account change. The closer to the moment, the more accurate the answer and the higher the response rate.

Channel. Ask in the channel where the interaction happened:

• in the app or on the website after a self-service task;
• by email or chat after a support conversation;
• by SMS, WhatsApp or an AI phone call after a phone interaction or a delivery;
• on a survey kiosk or a QR code for in-store experiences.

Frequency. Don't send a CES survey after every small interaction. Limit how often the same customer is asked, so survey fatigue doesn't lower your response rate.

What is a good Customer Effort Score?

There is no universal benchmark. CES depends on the task (a password reset and a mortgage application are not comparable), the industry, the scale and the method you use, so a number from another company tells you little.

The comparisons that help:

• Your trend over time: is CES rising after you changed a process or a feature?
• Channel against channel: is chat easier than phone? Is self-service easier than contacting support?
• Task against task: which journeys (returns, billing, onboarding) are hardest?
• Team and location: where are customers working hardest?

CEB's own guidance is a useful target: get as many customers as possible to at least "somewhat agree" (5 or more), because that is where most of the loyalty gain sits.

How to analyse CES comments

A CES number tells you that something was hard. The comments tell you what. Analyse them in the context of the interaction:

• Segment the answers by channel, task, product, agent or team, location and customer type. A low score in one channel can disappear inside the overall average.
• Group the comments into themes: transfers, repeating information, long waits, unclear instructions, broken self-service, having to switch channels, policies that create extra steps.
• Read the low scores first. Customers who answered 1 to 3 usually describe the exact step that failed.
• Compare easy and hard interactions for the same task to see what the easy ones did differently.
• Look for the root cause, not just the symptom. "Had to call twice" may come from an unclear email, a missing order status or a policy. Methods like the 5 Whys help; our guide to root cause analysis in customer feedback shows the full process.

With thousands of comments, manual reading stops scaling. Text analytics that groups comments by theme and sentiment shows which sources of effort are growing.

How to reduce customer effort

The HBR research behind CES points to a few changes that reduce effort most:

• Solve it the first time. Repeat contacts are one of the biggest sources of effort. CEB found that 22% of repeat calls involved downstream issues related to the original problem, even when that problem itself was solved. Anticipate the next question and answer it before the customer has to come back.
• Avoid transfers and repetition. Route customers to someone who can solve the problem, and pass the context along so nobody has to explain twice.
• Make self-service actually work. Customers who fail in self-service and then have to call experience more effort, not less. Use CES on help pages and in-app flows to find where they get stuck.
• Don't make customers switch channels. Being sent from chat to email to phone is effort. Resolve the issue in the channel where it started whenever you can.
• Simplify high-effort processes. Returns, billing changes, cancellations and bookings often collect the lowest scores. Remove steps, forms and policies that add work without adding value.
• Close the loop. Follow up with customers who gave low scores, fix what you can and tell them what changed. See our guide to customer retention strategies for how this keeps customers.

CES vs CSAT vs NPS

The three work best together: NPS for the relationship, CSAT for how each touchpoint went and CES for how hard each task was. You can calculate NPS with our free NPS calculator.

Limitations of CES

• It measures one moment. A low-effort support call doesn't mean the customer likes the product.
• It needs context. A score without the task, channel and comment is hard to act on.
• Scales and methods differ. 1–5 vs 1–7, share vs average, CES 1.0 vs 2.0: compare only like with like.
• Easy isn't everything. Some interactions should take effort (a security check, a complex purchase). Look at where effort adds no value.
• The research is about service. CEB's findings come from customer service interactions; for other journeys, test the link between effort and loyalty in your own data.

Where Pivony fits

• Sonic Survey lets you ask a CES-style question as a 1–5 rating question with an open follow-up, in writing or by voice through an AI phone call, triggered after moments such as a purchase or a CRM event. AI analyses every answer, and there is a free tier of 25 responses a month.
• The VoC platform brings those comments together with support tickets, app reviews and other feedback, analyses them by theme and sentiment, and shows the root cause behind the effort, segment by segment.

Next step

Want to know what makes your customers work too hard? Request a free 24h root cause scan on a sample of your survey comments, reviews or tickets, or book a demo.

Sources

• Dixon, M., Freeman, K., & Toman, N. (2010). Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers. Harvard Business Review, July–August 2010. CEB's study of 75,000+ customers and the original CES question.
• CEB (2013, archived). Unveiling the new and improved Customer Effort Score. CES 2.0, its predictive power and the 96% / 9% figure.
• Dixon, M., Toman, N., & DeLisi, R. (2013). The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty. Portfolio/Penguin.
• Delighted (archived 2024). What is Customer Effort Score (CES)? The Delighted guide this article replaces; Qualtrics has shut Delighted down.