Glossary
Customer Effort Score (CES)
How much effort a customer expended to get something done.
CES asks respondents to rate how much effort they had to put in to accomplish something — resolving an issue, completing a purchase — typically by agreeing or disagreeing with a statement like "The company made it easy for me to handle my issue." Lower effort is the goal.
The premise, from customer-experience research, is that reducing effort predicts retention better than delighting people does. Friction drives churn more reliably than the absence of delight drives loyalty, which makes CES a strong operational metric for service and product teams.
Use CES at effort-heavy touchpoints (support resolution, returns, account changes) and pair a low score with a free-text follow-up to find the specific obstacle. Read it alongside CSAT and NPS: effort, satisfaction and loyalty are related but distinct, and a form measuring all three needs careful question order to avoid priming.