Glossary / Definition
Customer Effort Score
Also: CES
A loyalty metric that measures how easy it was for a customer to accomplish what they wanted. Strong predictor of repurchase and churn.
Definition
Customer Effort Score (CES) asks customers how easy or hard it was to do something: make a return, get a question answered, complete a purchase. The scale is typically 1 (very easy) to 7 (very difficult), and CES is the percentage of customers giving the easy responses.
Research from CEB/Gartner found CES to be a stronger predictor of customer loyalty than CSAT or NPS in support contexts, because effort directly correlates with churn risk.
Why it matters
Friction kills retention. CES surfaces the specific interactions where customers had to work too hard, and those are the operations where unrecoverable churn hides.
How Resultid handles it
Resultid pairs CES with operational data on the same interaction (handle time, transfers, repeat contacts) so the effort signal becomes operational evidence. Patterns surface at the product, location, or service level.
Frequently asked
When should I use CES instead of CSAT?
Use CES for support, service, and self-serve interactions where ease matters more than satisfaction. Use CSAT when satisfaction with the outcome itself is the question.
What's a good CES?
Most enterprise targets land at 80%+ on the easy side of the scale. Below 70% indicates friction that's likely driving churn.
Is CES better than NPS?
Different jobs. CES predicts churn from friction; NPS measures relationship-level loyalty. Mature programs run both with CSAT.
See customer effort score in your own data.
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