Customer Effort Score
A metric measuring how much effort a customer must exert to resolve an issue or complete a task with a company, based on research showing low-effort experiences drive loyalty more reliably than high-satisfaction experiences.
Full Definition
Customer Effort Score (CES) was introduced by the Corporate Executive Board (now Gartner) in 2010 with the finding—counterintuitive at the time—that reducing customer effort drives loyalty more reliably than attempting to delight customers. The CES survey asks: "The company made it easy for me to handle my issue" (or a similar framing), rated on a 5-7 point scale from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree. The research finding was that 96% of customers who experienced high-effort service interactions became more disloyal, while satisfaction and even delight did not predict loyalty as reliably as low effort did. This insight shifted customer experience strategy from "how do we delight customers" to "how do we make interactions effortless." High-effort customer interactions manifest in several patterns: having to repeat information across multiple contacts (the #1 customer frustration in CEB's original research), transferring between multiple agents or departments before resolution, requiring multiple contacts to resolve a single issue, experiencing inconsistent information from different representatives, and navigating complex self-service processes that fail to resolve the issue and force escalation to human agents. Each of these patterns increases customer effort and drives disloyalty—customers who experience high-effort interactions actively seek alternatives and are more likely to share negative experiences with peers. The operational insight from CES is that effort reduction requires systemic process change, not improved individual agent performance. An agent cannot eliminate the need for customers to repeat information across contacts—that requires CRM integration that displays full interaction history. An agent cannot resolve a billing dispute on first contact if the authorization matrix requires escalation for credits above $200—that requires policy change. CES improvement programs therefore focus on systemic root causes (process failures, policy barriers, system limitations) rather than individual agent coaching, making CES a more useful operational improvement driver than satisfaction metrics that can be improved through service quality coaching alone.
FAQs
When should CES be used instead of NPS or CSAT?
CES is most appropriate for measuring service and support interactions where the primary customer goal is issue resolution, not an experience they seek out. For product usage and brand perception, NPS is more appropriate. For evaluating sales, onboarding, or proactive service interactions, CSAT better captures the sentiment appropriate to those touchpoints. Many companies use all three in different contexts: NPS for relationship health, CSAT for proactive interactions, and CES for reactive support and service touchpoints.
What is the fastest way to improve CES scores?
Eliminating repeat contacts—ensuring customers' issues are resolved completely on first contact without requiring follow-up—is the highest-leverage CES improvement lever, because this single driver appears most frequently in high-effort interaction diagnoses. Tactics include: first-contact resolution (FCR) measurement and incentivization, next-issue avoidance (proactively addressing related issues during a contact), improved agent empowerment (authority to resolve without escalation), and CRM integration that provides complete customer context to every agent handling a contact.
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