Effortless wins: how to measure and improve your Customer Effort Score (CES)

There’s a reason why moving junk food to a hard-to-reach shelf might help us eat less of it: the location is impractical, it’s going to take effort to reach it, and—unless the motivation is really strong—most of the time we end up not actually bothering.

Sometimes, online businesses are exactly like that hard-to-reach shelf: something impractical that requires extra effort and makes people lose motivation and leave.

The good news is that there is a simple way to find out if that’s the case with your business: all you have to do is ask your users and customers how much effort they have to put into doing business with you. This is the Customer Effort Score (CES), and measuring it can help you make accurate predictions of future business success or failure.

What is the Customer Effort Score (CES)?

Customer Effort Score, or CES, is a metric that measures a product or service’s ease of use to customers. The score is derived from a customer satisfaction survey and reflects the amount of effort a customer had to exert to use a product or service, find the information they needed, or get an issue resolved.

Customers are asked to respond to a statement like “[Name of the organization] made it easy for me to handle [issue]” with a 1-5 or 1-7 scale rating, where 1: strongly disagree and 5 or 7: strongly agree. 

The less effort required, the better the CES—and, arguably, the higher the customer satisfaction. 

Hotjar’s CES survey includes a 1-5 scale

Why you should pay attention to your CES

Measuring customer effort is essential for understanding your customers’ satisfaction and predicting their future behavior. By focusing on how easy it is for customers to achieve their goals, you actively help them succeed—whether it’s solving an issue, completing a purchase, or navigating your product.

Here’s why tracking your CES matters:

• It predicts future purchases. A Harvard Business Review (HBR) study found that 94% of customers with low-effort experiences said they’d buy again, with more recent studies confirming these findings.

• It signals referral likelihood. Easy interactions encourage positive word-of-mouth, while 81% of customers with high-effort experiences said they’d badmouth the company.

• It’s a strong loyalty predictor. Low-effort service outperforms general satisfaction as a loyalty indicator. According to HBR, customers value consistency over perks, and a Gartner study showed 96% of high-effort customers report being disloyal.

How CES compares to NPS® and CSAT

As a measure of customer effort, CES’s biggest strength is that it predicts customer retention and business growth—customers who find your processes easy are more likely to stick around. If your processes are cumbersome, they’re likely to turn to a competitor. 

That said, CES has its limitations. Since it focuses on individual interactions, it doesn’t capture the whole picture of a customer’s experience with your brand. That’s why businesses often pair CES with 2 other customer experience metrics: Net Promoter® Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT). 

Each of these metrics serves a unique purpose:

• CES pinpoints the ease of specific processes or interactions

• NPS® measures overall loyalty and brand perception

• CSAT reveals short-term satisfaction with a single interaction or experience

By combining them, you’ll get both the big-picture view and actionable insights into specific parts of the customer journey—helping you prioritize improvements where they matter most.

💡 Pro tip: notice how HubSpot pairs the CES question with an NPS® survey targeted to the customer support professional, to reveal whether the issue stemmed from the help agent or the product itself.

Hubspot pairs CES with an NPS® question for more detailed insights into customer satisfaction

Net Promoter® Score (NPS®)

NPS® evaluates customer loyalty by asking one big question: “How likely are you to recommend our product or service to someone else?” 

Customers rate their likelihood on a 0–10 scale, and the score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors (ratings of 6 or lower) from the percentage of promoters (ratings of 9 or 10).

NPS® survey results shown in the Contentsquare dashboard

NPS® works across various contexts, from evaluating a product to a hiring process. It gives you a sense of how happy customers are overall and how likely they are to recommend your business.

While useful for getting an overall perception of customer loyalty, NPS® doesn’t provide much in the way of nuance or detail. It doesn’t explain why customers feel the way they do—it’s a broad measure of brand perception, influenced by everything from pricing to customer support to product quality.

To make it actionable, businesses often include open-ended follow-up NPS® questions that dig deeper into the “why” behind the score.

💡 Pro tip: with Contentsquare Surveys you get access to 40+ templates—including our NPS® survey template—so you can start collecting feedback in minutes, not days.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

CSAT is a measurement of short-term customer satisfaction with a product or service. It’s measured using a simple survey which typically asks questions like

• “Were you happy with your shopping experience today?”

• “How would you rate the support you received?”

Customers answer with binary responses (yes/no, happy/sad face) or rate their satisfaction on a scale. The results are expressed as a percentage, with 100% being the ultimate goal.

Customer satisfaction scores are usually positive, so a sudden spike in negative scores can flag an issue that needs immediate attention.

Like CES, CSAT is a snapshot of a moment in time: a single interaction or action the customer engaged in. It can tell you how a single process is working but doesn’t measure overall customer loyalty or happiness. Adding follow-up questions, such as “What could we improve?”, helps uncover problematic areas that require your attention.

💡 Pro tip: to reach your customer satisfaction goals, dive deeper into why customers are satisfied or dissatisfied with your brand by asking them about their product experience. Contentsquare’s template library can help you get started. 

How to measure CES effectively

Measuring CES starts with collecting feedback at the right moment. The best time to ask is immediately after a customer takes an action—like completing a purchase—or interacts with your business, such as receiving help from your support team.

You can make this seamless by using an on-page survey that pops up directly on your site or sending an email survey right after the action. This ensures feedback is fresh and relevant.

For the survey itself, keep it simple but engaging. You can gather CES data through simple, efficient designs that encourage participation:

• Numbered scales: ask customers to rate ease of use (e.g., 1 = difficult, 7 = very easy). Use color-coding to enhance clarity.

• Likert scales: present statements like, “The checkout process was easy to navigate,” and let customers agree or disagree on a 7-point scale.

• Emoticon ratings: for quick feedback, use smiley faces or thumbs up/down to measure ease. These intuitive options boost response rates and are ideal for frequent surveys.

Getting started doesn't have to take long. With tools like Contentsquare Surveys, you can create a CES survey in just a few clicks by customizing our free template. Choose how it appears—whether as a pop-up, on-site banner, or email—and you’re good to go.

By designing effortless experiences, you’ll save your customers time and build lasting loyalty—just like how efficient UI designs predict user needs and eliminate unnecessary steps.

💡 Pro tip: save even more time by using Contentsquare AI for Surveys to generate a ready-to-use CES survey. It can also build a detailed summary report with key insights, direct quotes, and actionable next steps, making it easy for you to turn feedback into improvements.

Contentsquare AI for Surveys can automatically build you a survey based on your goal

How to interpret CES survey results

Once responses are in, you can quickly spot patterns by averaging the scores. This provides a clear view of how much effort a particular process demands from your customers, helping you identify areas to improve.

The way you calculate your CES depends on the scale used in your survey:

• Numbered poll: add all responses together and divide by the number of respondents to get an average. A higher average means a lower customer effort.

• Likert scale: assign a number between 1-7 to each answer. The higher the average, the better your CES.

• Happy/unhappy emoticons: calculate the percentage of happy responses out of the total happy and unhappy responses. A high percentage of happy faces and a low percentage of unhappy faces is ideal.

If your CES is high, congratulations! You’re on the right track. Keep monitoring it over time, and if you're using Contentsquare, you can easily track it on customizable dashboards.

If your CES is low, it’s time to dig deeper. CES tells you there’s an issue, but not the cause. It could be anything from a troublesome employee to a website glitch. To pinpoint the problem:

• Ask follow-up questions: short, targeted follow-up questions will get you more details about your customers’ experience. You can pair these with tools like Contentsquare’s Session Replay to see exactly where users are running into problems.

• Perform usability tests: testing your site or app can highlight areas where users get stuck. With Contentsquare's User Tests, you can see which parts of your site cause the most friction and require the most effort, helping you pinpoint issues.

• Hold customer interviews: talking to customers directly gives you deeper insights. Set up an interview in Contentsquare and use the data from your survey to guide the conversation, focusing on where they experienced difficulty.

Invite participants, record interviews, and get AI call transcripts, all directly inside Contentsquare

💡 Pro tip: after identifying the issue, make adjustments, then test again to ensure your CES improves. This continuous loop of testing, tweaking, and retesting ensures ongoing improvements and better user experiences.

What is a good customer effort score?

There’s no one-size-fits-all benchmark for a good CES, because businesses use different scales to collect responses. That said, the goal is clear: the higher your CES, the better. 

A high score means customers find your processes smooth and effortless. On the other hand, a low score signals frustration—whether from clunky processes or unhelpful customer support. If your CES isn’t where it should be, it’s a sign to take action before churn rates rise.

For example, product experience insights platform Hotjar, now part of the Contentsquare group, ran an on-page CES poll using a 1–7 scale (1 = very difficult, 7 = very easy) to gauge how easy it was for customers to use their tools. Here’s a snapshot of the results:

CES survey results showing an overall positive response

Almost 48% of customers gave them the highest score, which looked great at first glance. But another 48% didn’t have the easiest experience possible.

A different way of looking at CES scores reveals almost half of Hotjar’s customers weren’t having the easiest user experience

This perspective shifted the team at Hotjar's focus: they saw a huge opportunity to optimize those experiences and put their efforts into making their product even more user-friendly.

It’s all in the question: a note for CX metric pros

When CES was first introduced in 2010 by Gartner (formerly known as the Corporate Executive Board or CEB), the survey question read “How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?” and the scoring system went from 1 (very low effort) to 5 (very high effort). Back then, a low CES was a sign of success. 

What changed? One theory is that the formula put the bulk of the responsibility of a low effort onto the customer; a couple of years later, CEB proposed a new formulation: “[Name of the organization] made it easy for me to handle my issue,” which puts the responsibility right back onto the company and has since become the new CES standard.

Maximize the impact of your CES survey

Customer experience is a constantly moving target. To keep up, you need to keep measuring your Customer Effort Score and act quickly on any negative feedback. 

Make your process so smooth and easy that your customers can't imagine going anywhere else. Stay alert for any trends and continuously refine your approach to remove friction and make every interaction feel effortless.

FAQs about Customer Effort Score