Customer effort score (CES)

Customer effort score is a post-interaction survey metric that asks a customer to rate how easy or difficult it was to get their issue resolved, request handled, or task completed, typically on a 1–5 or 1–7 scale from "very low effort" to "very high effort." It is usually sent immediately after a support interaction, unlike broader relationship surveys.

CES is reported as the average rating, or as the percentage of respondents giving a low-effort score. It differs from customer satisfaction score, which asks how happy a customer felt, and from Net Promoter Score, which asks about loyalty; CES asks specifically about friction, and research popularizing the metric argued that reducing effort predicts repeat business better than trying to delight customers.

CES is widely used alongside first contact resolution to diagnose support quality, since a low effort score with a high resolution rate points to a well-designed support process. The main pitfall is response bias: customers who had a very bad experience are more likely to respond than those with a routine, low-effort interaction, which can make effort look worse than it typically is across all voice of the customer channels.