Customer effort score: what it is and how to measure it

What customer effort score is

Customer effort score is a survey metric that asks customers how easy or difficult it was to complete a task with you. Where CSAT asks whether they were happy and NPS asks whether they would recommend you, CES asks about friction: how much work the customer had to do to get an exchange processed, a bill corrected or an appointment moved.

The idea behind it is that customers often stay or leave because of hassle rather than delight. A store visit can be pleasant and still be hard work if the customer had to queue twice, repeat their order number to three people and come back the next day.

Where the idea came from

The metric is associated with a 2010 Harvard Business Review article by Dixon, Freeman and Toman. Their argument was that companies spend heavily on delighting customers when reducing the effort customers have to make is the more useful goal. You do not need to accept every claim in the article to find the question useful: it points attention at the steps that waste the customer's time.

The question to ask

Most teams use an agreement statement or a direct ease question. Both work; choose one and keep it.

• Agreement: "[Brand] made it easy for me to [task]." Strongly disagree to strongly agree.
• Direct: "How easy was it to [task] today?" Very difficult to very easy.
• Always name the task: "return your item", "book a service slot", "get your refund". A vague "How easy was it to deal with us?" produces a vague answer.

Choosing a scale

A 5-point or 7-point labelled scale is the usual choice. Seven points give a little more spread; five points are easier to read on a phone. Label every point or at least both ends and the middle, and keep the easy end in the same position on every survey you run so customers and analysts are never confused.

When to send it

CES belongs right after a defined task, while the experience is fresh. Good moments include a completed return or exchange, a closed support contact, a finished online booking, a home delivery with installation, a loan or account application step, and a store pickup of an online order.

It is a poor fit for a general relationship survey. "How easy is it to be our customer?" mixes too many experiences into one number.

How to calculate it

There are two common ways to turn the answers into a score. Pick one and write it next to every chart.

• Share of easy answers: responses in the top two boxes ("agree" and "strongly agree", or "easy" and "very easy") divided by all responses.
• Average: the mean of the scale values, for example 5.6 out of 7.
• Optionally track the share of difficult answers too; a rise in difficult answers is often more telling than a small change in the average.

A worked example

A chain sends a CES question after every completed exchange. In one month 400 customers answer on a 7-point agreement scale: 260 choose 6 or 7, 80 choose 4 or 5, and 60 choose 1 to 3. The easy share is 260 out of 400, or 65%. The difficult share is 15%. The useful next step is not the number but the 60 difficult answers: what did those customers write, and which stores and days do they come from?

Add one follow-up question

Ask an open question straight after the score: "What made it difficult?" for low scores, or "What, if anything, could we have made easier?" for everyone. These answers name the step that caused the effort, such as a missing receipt, a manager who had to approve, or a refund that took days to appear.

Judging the result

Do not chase a universal benchmark. The effort of returning a sofa is not comparable with the effort of reordering coffee. Compare a task against itself over time, compare stores or channels doing the same task, and compare before and after a process change. Show the number of responses next to each score so small samples are not over-read.

Acting on CES

• List the tasks you measure and the steps inside each one.
• Read the difficult answers and tag the step each one blames.
• Fix the most frequent step first: fewer handoffs, fewer repeated questions, clearer instructions.
• Re-measure the same task after the change and check the comments again.

Where reviews help

Surveys only reach the customers you ask. Customers who found a process painful often say so unprompted in Google reviews, in their own words and without your question shaping the answer. Reading effort-related complaints in reviews (queues, repeated visits, refund delays) alongside CES shows whether the survey is missing anything.

Common mistakes

• Asking about effort without naming the task.
• Changing the scale or wording mid-year and breaking the trend.
• Reporting the average without the share of difficult answers.
• Comparing effort across tasks that have nothing in common.
• Collecting comments and never reading them.

Common questions

Checklist

• Task named in the question.
• One scale, labelled, kept fixed.
• Survey sent right after the task.
• Calculation method written down.
• Open follow-up included and read.
• Results compared over time and across peers.

In short

Customer effort score asks how easy a specific task was. Ask it straight after the task, keep the question and scale fixed, track both the easy and difficult shares, and use the comments and reviews to find the step that creates the effort.

Doing this with Falcon

Falcon does not run surveys or feedback forms. It analyses the unprompted feedback customers already leave in Google Maps reviews of your locations and Google Play reviews of your app: each review is classified into themes, sub-themes and specific issues from your own taxonomy, with the sentiment of each mention and the exact quote behind it. Effort shows up in reviews as complaints about queues, repeat visits, refunds and handoffs; Falcon's negative share by topic, location and month shows where those complaints are rising, so you can compare them with your CES results on the same tasks.