What is customer effort score?
Also known as: CES
Customer effort score (CES) measures how much effort a customer had to expend to complete a task, typically by asking them to rate their agreement with a statement such as "the company made it easy for me to handle my issue" on a 1–7 scale. Lower effort correlates strongly with loyalty and repeat purchase.
Formula
How to calculate customer effort score
CES = Sum of all effort ratings ÷ Number of responses- Effort ratings
- Individual responses, typically on a 1–7 agreement scale
- Number of responses
- Total responses received
Worked example
Across 150 responses the ratings sum to 870. CES = 870 ÷ 150 = 5.8 out of 7.
In practice
What you need to know about customer effort score
Why CES often outperforms CSAT and NPS
Influential research on customer loyalty found that reducing effort predicts repeat behavior better than delighting customers does. The practical reading: customers rarely reward you for exceeding expectations, but they reliably punish friction. That makes CES the most actionable of the three common survey metrics, because a high-effort score points directly at a specific process to fix.
Where it applies in B2B
CES is most useful for bounded, repeatable tasks — onboarding a new user, getting a support issue resolved, running a report, completing an integration. It is a poor fit for measuring the overall relationship, where NPS or a health score is more appropriate.
How to improve it
Improving customer effort score
Target the highest-frequency tasks first
Effort compounds with repetition. A moderately annoying task performed daily damages loyalty more than a painful one performed annually.
Pair the score with the failure reason
A high-effort response is only useful if you know whether the cause was unclear documentation, too many handoffs, or a genuine product gap.
FAQ
Customer effort score questions, answered
What is a good customer effort score?+
On a 1–7 agreement scale where higher means less effort, above 5 is generally considered good and above 6 strong. As with other survey metrics, the scale and wording you choose affect the number, so track your own trend rather than comparing to external figures.
Is CES better than NPS?+
For predicting repeat behavior and identifying specific fixes, CES is generally more actionable, because a high-effort result points at a concrete process. NPS remains better for tracking overall relationship sentiment over time. They serve different purposes rather than competing.
Related terms
Keep reading
Customer satisfaction score
Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) measures how satisfied a customer is with a specific interaction, product, or service, usually by asking them to rate it on a scale of 1 to 5. It is expressed as the percentage of responses that are satisfied — typically the top two ratings.
Net promoter score
Net promoter score (NPS) is a customer loyalty metric based on a single question: how likely are you to recommend this product to a colleague, on a scale of 0 to 10. It is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors (0–6) from the percentage of promoters (9–10), producing a score between −100 and +100.
Customer onboarding
Customer onboarding is the process of guiding a new customer from purchase to their first meaningful business outcome with the product. It is the phase of the customer lifecycle with the strongest measured influence on long-term retention.
Time to value
Time to value (TTV) is the elapsed time from a customer’s purchase to the moment they realize their first meaningful benefit from the product. Shorter time to value correlates strongly with higher retention and faster expansion.
Customer health score
A customer health score is a composite metric that summarizes how likely an account is to renew, expand, or churn, calculated by weighting signals such as product usage, engagement, support history, and relationship strength into a single value.
Your next account move is already in the signals
Know the metric. Know why it moved.
Aartha keeps a cited, time-aware memory of every account — so a health change or a churn signal comes with the evidence behind it.