What is Customer Effort Score?

A metric asking how easy the company made it to handle an issue — typically 1-7 agreement with 'the company made it easy.'

Why does effort matter more than delight?

The study found high effort actively destroys loyalty while delight barely raises it — reducing effort is the higher-leverage investment.

Growth Marketing Glossary

Customer Effort Score (CES)

cus·tom·er ef·fort score/ˈkəstəməɹ ˈɛfəɹt skɔɹ/noun

Customers don't leave because you failed to delight them — they leave because you made them work.

Schematic — the effort curve from effortless to exhausting

Term: Customer Effort Score
Abbreviation: CES
Origin: Dixon, Freeman & Toman — HBR, 2010
Typical scale: 1-7 agreement, 'made it easy'

Forms & parts of speech

CES · noun

The ease-of-resolution score.

"The CES on password resets is brutal — four contacts to fix a two-minute problem."

Definition in plain terms

Customer Effort Score measures how much work a customer had to do to get something done — resolve a ticket, return a product, change a plan. The modern form (CES 2.0) asks agreement with "The company made it easy to handle my issue" on a 1-7 scale. The premise, from the research that coined it: reducing effort predicts loyalty better than exceeding expectations.

The mechanics

The metric came out of CEB's 2010 study of 75,000+ service interactions, published in HBR as "Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers" (Dixon, Freeman, Toman) and expanded in The Effortless Experience. The finding: delight barely moves loyalty, but high effort actively destroys it — channel switching, repeat contacts, transfers, and re-explaining are the four horsemen. Ask CES immediately after resolution; track the effort DRIVERS alongside the score, or you have a number with no to-do list.

When it matters

CES matters most where customers are trying to accomplish something — support, returns, onboarding, account changes — and it converts directly into a fix list (kill the transfer, remember the context, solve in channel one). It pairs with CSAT (was it good?) and NPS (would you recommend us?) as the actionable leg of the trio. Limits: it's transactional by design, and a low-effort experience with a broken product still loses the customer.

Worked example. A SaaS company's support satisfaction looks fine, but renewals slip. The CES instrumentation finds the pattern CSAT missed: customers rate agents kindly (high CSAT) while reporting brutal effort — average 3.4 contacts per resolution, with re-explanation at every step. The effort program (context carried across channels, first-contact ownership, a status page that kills 'any update?' tickets) cuts contacts per issue in half. Renewal rates follow within two quarters — exactly the loyalty linkage the 2010 research promised.

Failure modes to watch. Measuring effort without instrumenting its drivers; celebrating polite agents while the process exhausts customers; and using CES where nothing was being accomplished — it's a task metric, not a mood metric.

Synonyms & antonyms

Synonyms

CEScustomer effort scoreeffort score

Antonyms

effortless experience (the goal)high-effort service

Origin & history

Coined by Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman, and Nicholas Toman of CEB (now Gartner) in their July-August 2010 Harvard Business Review article "Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers," based on a study of 75,000+ service interactions; the book The Effortless Experience (2013) formalized CES 2.0's wording.

Etymology: source.

Usage trends

Search interest for this term over the last five years:

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Common questions

What is Customer Effort Score?: A metric asking how easy the company made it to handle an issue — typically 1-7 agreement with 'the company made it easy.'
Where did CES come from?: CEB's 2010 research published in HBR as 'Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers' by Dixon, Freeman, and Toman.
Why does effort matter more than delight?: The study found high effort actively destroys loyalty while delight barely raises it — reducing effort is the higher-leverage investment.

Related tools & calculators

toolFunnel drop-off analyzer

Resources & people to follow

paper"Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers" — HBR, 2010
bookThe Effortless Experience — Dixon, Toman & DeLisi
referenceGartner — CES guidance (CEB's successor)

Curated, non-competitor resources verified per term.

Related training

moduleMarketing analytics

Disciplines

Areas of marketing where customer effort score (ces) is a core concern:

MeasurementGrowth strategy

Sources

trendsGoogle Trends — "customer effort score"