Customer Effort Score, or CES, measures how easy or difficult a customer found it to get their issue resolved, usually through one question like the company made it easy for me to handle my issue, scored on an agreement scale.

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‍Why it matters

CES came out of 2010 research published in Harvard Business Review by researchers at CEB, now part of Gartner, who found that reducing customer effort predicted loyalty better than trying to exceed expectations. Their study showed that a high-effort interaction, being transferred repeatedly, repeating information, switching channels to get an answer, made customers measurably more likely to become disloyal, more strongly than a low-effort interaction made them loyal.

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‍What it points teams toward

Because CES is about the process rather than the mood of the interaction, it points support teams toward operational fixes, reducing transfers, cutting repeat contacts, reducing how many times a customer has to explain themselves, rather than agent tone or friendliness, which is closer to what empathy scoring captures.

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‍How it differs from NPS and CSAT

NPS asks about overall loyalty to the company, CSAT asks how satisfied a customer felt about one interaction, and CES asks specifically how hard that interaction was. A customer can be satisfied and still report high effort, if the agent was friendly but the process took five transfers, which is exactly the gap CES is built to catch.