Customer Effort Score survey template: the no-fuss way to track user frustration

Your product feels easy—to you. But what about your customers?

You built the flows. You know the paths. But your users? They’re figuring it out as they go. If something’s confusing, clunky, or just plain frustrating, you might not see it…unless you ask.

That’s what the Customer Effort Score (CES) survey is for. It gives your users a chance to rate how easy (or hard) it was to complete a task—so you’re not guessing where the friction lives.

The lower the effort, the better the experience. The better the experience, the more likely they’ll come back.

With this survey, you'll learn:

• Your Customer Effort Score (CES) 

• Suggestions to reduce the customer’s effort when using your product

• Ideas to dramatically improve the customer experience

• A benchmark that you can compare and refer to over time

Discover ways to improve customer satisfaction  

Measuring CES is vital when determining customer satisfaction and predicting behavior. Simply put, reducing your customers’ effort when they’re using your product can win loyalty from your audience. Increasing the customer effort can have the opposite effect—putting off buyers and encouraging loyal customers to churn. 

Studies have shown that making life easier for customers is a faster and more effective way to win their loyalty than providing extra frills or ‘wow-worthy’ customer service—especially when you learn that the leading source of customer frustration is something as basic as having to wait for a response when a problem or issue appears. There are 3 core benefits you’ll get from measuring your CES: 

1. Customer Effort Score can predict customer behavior 

Make something easy and you’ll encourage repeat behavior. A study found that a good CES is one of the strongest predictors of future purchase behavior: 94% of customers who reported low effort said they would likely purchase a product again.

2. Customer Effort Score can lead to more high-value purchases

High-value purchases are often what fuel real growth: when customers find something easy to use and worth investing in, they’re more likely to spend more and stick around. Studies found that your CES is a good indicator of the amount your customers will end up spending on your product. In fact, 88% of customers who report a low CES say they’re likely to spend more with that brand. 

3. Customer Effort Score predicts customer loyalty  

Compared to customer satisfaction scores and Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) scores, CES tends to be a better measure of how loyal customers are. One study by Gartner, which developed CES, found that 96% of customers who reported high-effort experiences also reported being disloyal, while only 9% of those with low-effort experiences did.

3 questions you’ll be able to answer

Here are the 3 questions you’ll be able to answer after launching a successful CES survey:

1. Do customers struggle to buy my product? 

Send a CES Survey directly after a customer has made a purchase on your website to get an idea of how easy or convoluted the purchasing process was for them. You might find that several customers find the process difficult—perhaps there are a few small tweaks you can make to streamline the process. 

2. What do people think of my customer service? 

CES is particularly useful for testing the effectiveness of your customer service. Customers who have frustrating or unhelpful customer service interactions are likely to take their business elsewhere. By following up directly after an interaction, you can find out if a customer experienced a difficult service phone call or chat.

3. Is my product easy to use? 

Send a CES survey after a customer has signed up for a subscription service to gauge whether they think your services are easy to use. Measuring this score over time gives you a sense check on whether or not the improvements you make to your product are actually helping users.

An example of a Contentsquare Customer Effort Score (CES) survey

💡 Pro tip: Contentsquare’s Surveys tool lets you fully customize your surveys to make them your own. You can

• Tweak each question in the template or add your own

• Change the color scheme (more colors available on our growth plan)

• Pick between full-screen, pop-up, or external link surveys

Choose the perfect type of survey that best fits your needs with Contentsquare’s Surveys tool

How to set up the customer effort score survey with Contentsquare in seconds

Getting started with Contentsquare’s CES survey is fast and easy. 

1. Navigate to Surveys in Contentsquare from the left-hand menu

2. Click ‘New Survey’ in the upper-right corner

3. Choose to start from scratch or use one of 40+ templates—like the customer effort score template—then customize it as needed

Once set up, your survey is ready to send to customers and start gathering valuable insights.

📌 Reminder: ensure the Contentsquare tag is installed on your site. This tracking code allows you to host the survey live on your site rather than via an external URL. This might be useful if you want to show the CES survey to users on a certain page. It’ll also mean you’ll be able to access all of Contentsquare’s existing features.

Don’t worry, installing the tag won’t slow down your website. And it doesn’t cost you anything (our free plans are free forever). To set up your full Contentsquare account and install the tag, follow these steps, or simply use the Contentsquare and Google Tag Manager integration.

FAQs about the customer effort score survey template