What Is a Customer Effort Score & How to Understand, Collect, and Act on CES Surveys

A Customer Effort Score (CES) is a metric that measures how easy or difficult it is for customers to interact with your business. It helps predict customer behavior, fight churn, and increase customer lifetime value. CES surveys are single-item Likert scale surveys that ask customers about the ease of their interaction with your product or service. A good CES score ranges from 6-7 on a scale of 1-7. CES differs from CSAT and NPS scores in that it focuses on transactional low effort/high effort, while CSAT measures satisfaction and NPS measures relational experience. Lowering the Customer Effort Score can increase customer loyalty and reduce churn. To build an effective CES survey, keep questions simple and clear, deliver them where the action takes place, and use follow-up questions sparingly. Act on CES insights by prioritizing product backlog, simplifying processes, streamlining customer service, building self-serve support solutions, providing room for customer feedback, implementing low-effort principles, and letting customers know you heard them.