Glossary

Customer effort score (CES): what it is and what it means for you as a buyer

Also called: CES, Effort score. Last reviewed .

Customer effort score (CES) is a one-question survey score that measures how easy it was for a customer to get an issue handled. Customers rate the effort on a short scale, usually just after a support contact ends.

What it means for you as a buyer

Customer effort score points straight at chores your agent can remove. Customers report high effort when they repeat themselves, get passed between people, are asked for an order number they already gave, or have to write back to chase. A dedicated agent who knows your products and reads the whole thread fixes most of those. The measure comes from research by Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman and Nicholas Toman in Harvard Business Review (July–August 2010), which argued that cutting customer effort does more for loyalty than going above and beyond. Use the score to find the friction, then read the low-scoring tickets.

A worked example with numbers

In this example, 50 replies on a 1-to-7 scale average 5.84, and 86% of customers rated their contact easy (5 or more). Many help desks ask a single question, such as "How easy was it to get your issue handled?", from 1 (very hard) to 7 (very easy). The replies are made up to show the sum.

Example: 50 customer effort survey replies
Score Replies Score × replies
7 (very easy) 20 140
6 15 90
5 8 40
4 4 16
2 3 6
Total 50 292

The average is 292 ÷ 50 = 5.84; the share of easy replies is 43 ÷ 50 = 86%. The three replies that scored 2 matter most. If all three customers had to send their order number twice, the fix is a reply template, not a pep talk.

Where this appears in our pricing or process

Customer effort score is not on the provider's confirmed reporting, so if your help desk already sends the survey, ask on the call for it to sit on your live reporting sheet beside first response time. Ask the team lead to pull the low-scoring tickets for coaching. The who-manages section of the how-it-works page shows who reviews the work and how the results reach you.

Questions buyers ask

How is it different from customer satisfaction (CSAT)?

A customer satisfaction score (CSAT) asks how happy the customer was. Customer effort score asks how hard it was. A polite agent can score well on happiness while the customer still had to write three times.

  • First response time (FRT)
    First response time is how long a customer waits for the first reply from a person. How to read it, and how overnight cover changes it, with an example.
  • QA scorecard
    A QA scorecard grades a sample of an agent's real tickets or calls against your rules. What to ask for, with a worked example of a weekly scorecard.
  • Average handle time (AHT)
    Average handle time is the average time an agent spends on one contact, wrap-up included. How to use it to size a seat, with a worked example.

How the team lead checks your agent's work

Sources

  1. Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers, by Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman and Nicholas Toman, Harvard Business Review, July–August 2010.
  2. Customer satisfaction, Wikipedia, checked 7 November 2026.

We publish what the provider has confirmed in writing. If a figure is not here, we have not been able to confirm it.