What is Customer Effort Score?
The Customer Effort Score measures how hard an interaction was for the customer. The original question from the study reads, verbatim, "How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?", answered on a scale from 1 to 5 where 5 stands for very high effort. It was introduced by Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman and Nicholas Toman in the Harvard Business Review in 2010. A later variant flips the question into an agreement statement ("The company made it easy for me to handle my issue") on seven points. Both are in circulation, which is why a CES quoted without its scale cannot be compared with anything.
The point of the measure is not the number but the direction of view. Satisfaction and recommendation ask how good it was. Effort asks what got in the way. The authors attribute its stronger predictive power in service interactions to two properties: CES captures a single transaction rather than a holistic impression of the company, and it registers negative experiences as readily as positive ones. The Net Promoter Score still has its place beside it, on a different level: NPS describes the relationship, CES describes the transaction.
In practice the question belongs wherever a process has just closed: after a resolved ticket, after onboarding, after the first invoice. It answers in five seconds and produces a ranking of your friction points. The limit is worth holding in mind: it measures friction in a process, not the value of your offer. A product nobody needs can be effortless to use and still go unsold.
Why does Customer Effort Score matter?
The numbers behind the measure are unusually stark. In the underlying Customer Contact Council study of more than 75,000 customers over three years, 94 per cent of those reporting low effort said they intended to repurchase and 88 per cent said they would increase their spending. Only 1 per cent said they would speak negatively about the company. Conversely, 81 per cent of customers who had a hard time solving their problem reported an intention to spread negative word of mouth. Friction is therefore not a comfort issue; it is the most direct route by which service destroys revenue.
Customer Effort Score in practice
- 01One question after every closed support ticket: how easy was it to get this sorted?
- 02After onboarding, because that is where most unnecessary effort is created and where it can still be corrected.
- 03Not as a quarterly figure in a report, but as a ranking: which process generated the most effort this month?
