What is customer effort score?
Customer effort score, or CES, measures how much work a customer had to do to get an issue resolved, a question answered or a request completed. The premise is simple: customers value ease. The less effort an interaction takes, the more likely they are to stay loyal and the less likely they are to ring again.
CES is usually captured with a short survey straight after an interaction. The most common version asks customers to rate their agreement with a statement such as “[Organisation] made it easy for me to handle my issue” on a scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Older versions asked “How much effort did you personally have to put forth?”, but the agreement format is now more common because it’s easier to interpret.
How CES is calculated
There are two common methods:
- Percentage agreeing. On a 1 to 7 scale, count the responses of 5, 6 or 7 and divide by the total number of responses. 650 agreeing out of 1,000 gives a CES of 65%.
- Average score. Add all ratings and divide by the number of responses, for example 5.4 out of 7.
As with customer satisfaction score, the method matters when comparing figures, so be explicit about which one you use.
Why effort matters
CES sits alongside CSAT and net promoter score, but answers a different question. CSAT asks whether the customer was happy; NPS asks whether they would recommend you. CES asks whether you made it easy.
That’s useful in a contact centre because effort is so closely linked to things you can change:
- Repeat contacts. Low first contact resolution means the customer must call, email or chat again.
- Transfers. Every transfer, particularly a cold one, adds effort. A warm transfer with context passed on reduces it.
- Repeating information. Without a single customer view, customers explain their issue to every person they reach.
- Waiting. Long queues and poor queue callback options mean customers spend time just trying to get through.
- Channel dead ends. A chatbot or self-service option that can’t finish the job, with no easy route to a person, increases effort.
How to reduce customer effort
Practical ways contact centres lower effort include:
- Fixing the top repeat-contact reasons at the root, rather than handling the same issue again and again.
- Passing context with every handover, whether from an IVR, an AI assistant or another agent, so the customer never starts over.
- Being proactive. Telling customers about an outage, delay or change before they ask removes the need to contact you at all.
- Designing simple IVR menus with a clear, quick way to reach a person.
- Empowering agents to resolve rather than escalate, with good knowledge and clear authority.
Using CES well
CES is most useful when linked to the contact reason and journey, because effort varies so much between tasks. A password reset should be close to effortless; a complex billing dispute may never be. Comparing like with like, and reading CES alongside operational data and conversation analytics, shows where effort is unnecessary and where the process itself needs to change.