Customer effort score: The easiest way to measure customer friction

When customers need help, they want the experience to be as effortless as possible. To know if you fill that need, you can use customer effort score (CES) to measure how easily people find answers and get issues fixed.

When customers can solve problems and find what they want without unnecessary friction, they tend to trust your company more and are more likely to renew their contracts. A good overall customer effort score often means better account happiness and more retention.

In this article, we’ll look at what a CES is, how to measure and improve yours, and how to use insights from that process to offer better B2B support. 

Understanding the customer effort score

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CES measures the effort involved in customer interactions. A high CES shows that a task or conversation was effortless, and a low score means it was slow and/or difficult. 

Your CES matters because it reflects how well your support team works and where they need to improve. This score also predicts customer satisfaction and relationship strength — when you create an effortless experience, you make customers happier and more willing to invest in long-term partnerships.

How to measure your customer effort score

To measure CES, send a customer effort score survey after each interaction, and ask a simple question like: “How easy was it to resolve your issue?” Add a scale so customers can simply click a button to give a score.

Most CES scales run from 1 (very difficult) to 5 (very easy). You can also use a statement like “The company made it easy for me to resolve this issue,” and ask customers to rate their agreement on a Likert scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). 

Whichever method you choose, also add a prompt for open-ended feedback. This lets customers share more detailed thoughts that explain their scores.

Share the surveys immediately after an interaction, on the same channel each customer used to communicate with your team. That could mean embedding the surveys in customer portals or sharing them in-app. With a tool like Pylon, you can also automate surveys so they don’t add to your team’s workload or get overlooked.

Once you have enough survey data, the customer effort score calculation is simple. Just add up all the scores and divide that total by the number of surveys to get an average.

Best practices for customer effort score surveys

These best practices make sure your customer feedback surveys are accurate and reliable:

• Send surveys immediately after interactions. Customers are more likely to respond when interactions are fresh in their minds, and those responses are more often accurate and useful.
• Use simple, neutral phrasing. It’s important to not lead customers toward particular answers, so avoid loaded questions like: “How easy was it to resolve your issue quickly and easily, thanks to our helpful support team?”
• Keep each survey short and focused. Customers don’t want to spend a long time answering a survey, so too many questions lead to lower response rates.
• Segment results by channel and touchpoint. Automatically tag each survey result with its channel and touchpoint. This way, you can see if customers find email support easier than self-service or put more effort into some tasks than others.
• Pair scores with open feedback. Although numerical scores are easier to track over time, it’s also important to let customers add comments. This qualitative feedback gives more detail about problem areas.

Making sense of your CES

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Here’s how to get useful insights from your CES:

• Track scores over time. Calculate your CES score at set times, like monthly or quarterly, and look for patterns. See what the score looks like during typical periods, and watch how it rises or falls after you make changes to your success playbooks.
• Compare channels. Along with tracking your overall CES, calculate scores for different channels like email and live chat. This tells you if your omnichannel support is well-rounded or if some platforms need more attention.
• Focus on important touchpoints. Use CES to find points in the customer journey where effort and friction increase.
• Research industry standards. Find out what common CES results are for your niche to see where you stack up against competitors.

How companies use CES insights to boost support

Let’s look at some examples of how real companies translate CES averages into positive business outcomes:

• Red Hat. SaaS company Red Hat made targeted changes based on CES feedback, updating features and steps to make them more clear and user-friendly. For example, they let customers proactively give more information when opening support tickets, reducing back and forth.
• Blue KC. Healthcare insurance provider Blue KC shifted to a focus on CES, and saw positive impacts on other support metrics like first contact resolution and customer satisfaction.
• Keva. Pension agency Keva put a lot of work into making their online “My Pension” service simpler to use, and this improved both their CES and customers’ use of the service.
• Vocus. Telecommunications company Vocus gathered CES feedback and used it to streamline support. Their CES increased, and they got fewer complaints while seeing higher first contact resolution scores.

Tips to improve your CES

If your CES is low, here are some ways to raise it:

• Streamline core processes. Fix delays and bottlenecks in important workflows like onboarding and contract renewal. Look for ways to simplify or automate tasks, remove unneeded steps, clarify ownership, and improve communication.
• Offer great self-service. Give customers easy self-service options — a well-designed knowledge base or AI agent helps customers find what they need with little effort.
• Use support tools that show context. Make sure your customer support platform gives your team full context and visibility, so customers never have to repeat themselves.
• Reduce handoffs and ownership gaps. Focus on potential weak points in your workflows, like handoffs from one team to another, and make sure it’s always clear who’s responsible for each issue.
• Train your team on clarity and empathy. Give your team training to boost their customer support skills. When team members communicate clearly and listen with full attention and empathy, they’re more likely to create effortless customer experiences.
• Act on CES feedback in real time. Monitor CES feedback as it comes in, and take immediate action to improve anything that demands too much customer effort.

Use CES and modern support tools to minimize customer effort

CES tells you how well your customer support processes work and where they need to improve. When you monitor CES often and use it to plan changes, you can make the customer experience more effortless, which often leads to higher satisfaction and retention. And a quality support platform makes it easy to create customer surveys and track key support metrics. 

Pylon is the modern B2B support platform that offers true omnichannel support across Slack, Teams, email, chat, ticket forms, and more. Our AI Agents and Assistants automate busywork and reduce response times. Plus, with Account Intelligence that unifies scattered customer signals to calculate health scores and identify churn risk, we're built for customer success at scale.

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FAQ

What does CES stand for?

CES stands for customer effort score, and it measures how much effort customers have to use to get answers and help from your support team.

What’s a good customer effort score?

A good CES depends on your scale, but generally lower effort (or higher agreement with ease statements) indicates better performance. Trends over time are often more meaningful than a single score.

Is customer effort score better than CSAT or NPS?

CES measures a different aspect of the customer experience. While CSAT measures satisfaction and NPS measures loyalty, CES focuses specifically on how easy or difficult an interaction felt.

When should I send a customer effort score survey?

A CES survey is most effective when sent immediately after key interactions, such as after a support ticket is resolved, onboarding is completed, or a task flow is finished.