The Customer Effort Score and How to Improve It

Businesses use customer service metrics to gauge how customers feel about interacting with them and completing purchases. One of these metrics is the Customer Effort Score (CES). 

CES measures a single interaction with your business, focusing on how easy or difficult that experience is for the customer.

Depending on how the question is phrased, a low CES can mean that the easier it is for a customer to interact with your business, the more likely they’ll remain loyal to it. On the other hand, the harder or more difficult it is for customers to order, buy, pay, have an issue resolved, etc. with your business, the higher your CES score will be.

Insufficient CES score offers valuable insight for businesses aiming to improve – whether in payments, products, or customer support interactions.

In this article, we explain what CES means. We also offer steps that guide you in terms of  how to improve your customer effort score.

What Is the Customer Effort Score (CES)?

The Customer Effort Score measures the ease or difficulty a customer experiences when interacting with your brand. This is a measurement that captures customer sentiment at a single interaction point.

CES can reflect various interactions, such as requesting support, signing up for a service, or making an online payment. Depending on your business and industry, it provides a quick snapshot of the customer experience.

One example of a low-effort experience versus a high-effort experience is when a customer reaches out to your customer support team:

• A low-effort experience means the customer receives a quick and convenient solution through the support channel they used.
  
• A high-effort experience occurs when a customer must use multiple channels to contact your brand, repeat their issue to several support agents, and wait through long delays before reaching a resolution.

In practice, CES is often used alongside the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS). CSAT measures satisfaction at a specific touchpoint, offering real-time insight into a single interaction. NPS, on the other hand, gauges a customer’s overall willingness to recommend your business.

How CES influences customer behaviour

Studies carried out in 2010 by the CEB (later purchased by Gartner) found that a low CES measurement (meaning low effort) is good for business. The reasons for this include the fact that the least amount of effort a customer has to put in to get a desired outcome leads to improved customer loyalty and better levels of customer satisfaction.

Additionally, low effort also translates into lower customer service costs as well as reductions in customer churn. When businesses strive to improve the overall customer experience by reducing the levels of customer effort, they ultimately benefit operationally and strategically over the long run.

In the Effortless Experience book, the authors found that high effort experience customers are 96% more likely to become disloyal to the business, compared to 9% of those with a low effort experience. As such, disloyal customers “are likely to cost the company more” by ceasing to purchase from the business again and making negative word-of-mouth recommendations.

How Customer Effort Score Is Measured

If your business doesn’t yet measure CES, it’s important to get the basics right from the beginning. Here’s how to measure and set up your CES survey.

Designing effective CES surveys

An effective CES survey is typically a single question sent to customers immediately after their interaction with your business. Timing is key to capturing accurate feedback.

Often, the wording is “How easy was it for us to solve your problem with us today?”. 

However, it varies from organisation to organisation. The ideal best practice here is to keep the question short and focused while leaving space for an honest evaluation by the customer. The typical answers to this question range from very easy, easy, somewhat easy, somewhat difficult and difficult.

You can add a second, open-ended question to encourage customers to leave feedback about their experience. This helps your business identify issues and take proactive steps to resolve them.

CES scoring methods and interpretation

To ensure accuracy in your CES scoring, you need to use the right scoring methods. 

There are three primary ways to score a customer’s feedback:

• A 1-5 point Likert scale;
• A 1-7 point Likert scale (to capture a wider spectrum of nuances in the response);
• An emoticon scale, ranging from happy to angry.

As implied, a lower score on the Likert scale indicates lower effort and, therefore, greater customer satisfaction with their experience. The opposite is also true. As for the emoticon scale, it’s evident that the more “happy” emoticons you receive, the better the customer’s experience at that point in time.

To measure CES scores, simply add up the responses from the Likert scale to reach a total. Then, divide that total by the total number of responses to get your score. The lower it is, the better performance it indicates for your business offering.

Tools and platforms for measuring CES

Most CES surveys are sent out digitally. This means you need to have the right online tools to capture your customers’ experience. These tools can range from specific survey software to customer relationship management (CRM) tool integrations.

Whichever option you choose, be sure to use every possible digital (and telephonic) touchpoint with your business as an opportunity to capture this data. CES metrics can be sent out through the chatbot on your site, through email, as a scoring system after a telephone call, on a mobile app, etc.

CES vs. Other Customer Experience Metrics

Customer feedback is vital for identifying areas where your business can improve. It can be gathered in several ways, including CES, NPS, and CSAT surveys. 

Each measures a different aspect of the customer experience. Here’s how they differ.

CES vs NPS (Net Promoter Score)

An NPS comparison with CES scores is worthwhile because while the NPS measures the overall likelihood of recommending your brand to others over a period of time, the CES measures the level of effort a customer exerted to reach a final point of completion or resolution. 

CES vs CSAT (Customer Satisfaction)

Meanwhile, the CSAT comparison with the CES score is also valuable. While CSAT measures customer satisfaction for a given interaction, CES is often used as a predictive metric to determine customer retention, loyalty, and potentially customer churn.

Layering each of these three metrics and analysing them together often produces far deeper customer insights as opposed to looking at one alone or considering them in isolation from each other.

When and Where to Use CES

By collecting CES at key touchpoints, UK-based businesses – both in-store and online – can identify interaction patterns, streamline support, and enhance overall customer success.

Key touchpoints for collecting CES data

CES works best when it’s tied to specific moments of service interaction. These touchpoints give businesses clear, actionable insights into whether customers feel processes are intuitive, smooth and aligned with their customer needs. 

Here’s when to add CES surveys to your customers’ journey:

• Post-purchase: After a transaction, measuring transactional CES helps you understand how easy it was for customers to complete a purchase, receive confirmation or access self-service options like order tracking.
  
• Customer support: Whether customers contact you via phone, live chat, email or help desk, this is a prime moment to measure effort. A low CES here shows that your proactive communication and support processes are working effectively.
  
• Onboarding: For businesses where setup and activation are crucial, collecting CES during onboarding reveals friction points early. It ensures customers experience smooth customer engagement from day one.

From setting up card terminals in-store to navigating online dashboards, UK merchants can use CES at any step where customers complete a task. This includes checkout flows, device troubleshooting, account management or payment reconciliation.

Transactional vs relational CES

Understanding the difference between transactional CES and relational CES helps you choose the right approach for your business model.

Here is what to keep in mind:

• Transactional CES: This measures effort required during a specific customer interaction, such as resolving an issue, completing a purchase or using a new feature. It’s ideal for identifying friction in individual steps and is especially valuable in fast-moving business-to-consumer (B2C) environments where task completion is frequent and immediate.
  
• Relational CES: This gauges the general ease of dealing with a company over time. It reflects the broader sentiment of customer-business interactions and is more relevant to business-to-business (B2B) models where long-term relationships, account management and recurring service interaction are central.

Both approaches play an important role in strengthening customer success. By choosing the right moment and the right CES type, you can better understand customer needs, reduce friction and build a better experience at every stage of the customer journey.

How To Analyse CES Data for Actionable Insights

The real value of CES lies in turning data into actionable improvements. By analysing CES across channels, customer segments, and key touchpoints, UK businesses can pinpoint high-effort areas and prioritise changes that improve the overall experience.

Segmenting results by customer type or channel

Segmenting CES results helps you understand how different audiences experience your processes. By comparing responses from new versus returning customers or online versus in-person users, you can spot which interactions create unnecessary effort.

For UK merchants, this may reveal that online checkout flows cause more friction than in-store terminal use (or vice versa). In turn, this can enable targeted improvements that match each customer’s preferred engagement method.

Common indicators of high customer effort

High-effort interactions tend to display similar warning signs: long wait times, repeated contacts, unclear instructions, confusing interfaces or slow service interactions.

In UK customer service contexts, these issues often appear in call centre queues, complicated returns processes, or multi-step verification during payments.

When CES highlights these pain points, businesses can refine instructions, simplify workflows or enhance proactive communication. The goal is to create smoother, more intuitive experiences across all channels.

Strategies to Improve the Customer Effort Score

Improving CES means reducing friction at every stage of your customers’ journey. For UK businesses, lower effort translates directly into stronger loyalty, higher conversion rates, and more positive customer engagement.

The following strategies help create intuitive, reliable experiences that allow customers to get what they need with minimal effort.

Streamlining support processes

Efficient support is essential for reducing effort. Eliminating unnecessary hand-offs ensures customers aren’t bounced between departments, while First Contact Resolution (FCR) techniques help teams resolve issues at the first touch.

Clear escalation paths, well-trained agents, and smart routing tools all contribute to quicker and smoother service interactions. The result is fewer repeated contacts and a more seamless support experience.

Empowering through self-service options

Self-service is one of the fastest ways to reduce customer effort. UK businesses can leverage well-structured knowledge bases, automated frequently asked questions (FAQs), chatbot assistants, and digital guides to help customers resolve issues independently.

Clear digital journeys may include step-by-step activation flows or checkout troubleshooting. They can significantly reduce the need to contact support. When customers can find answers instantly, customer needs are met without added friction.

Training and empowering frontline staff

Frontline teams play a major role in shaping CES. Training staff in customer empathy, clear communication, and problem-solving helps them deliver smoother customer interaction moments.

Connecting CES results to performance metrics encourages agents to focus on reducing effort and not just on closing tickets. Empowered staff with the right tools and authority can resolve issues quickly.

Improving ease of use across channels

Consistency across channels is key. An omnichannel approach, where online, in-app and in-person experiences all feel aligned, helps customers move between touchpoints effortlessly.

For some businesses such as online stores, simplifying card payment flows, improving checkout design, and ensuring intuitive device setup removes common barriers. When customers know what to expect across channels, the overall experience feels easier and more predictable.

Proactive communication and follow-up

Proactive communication reduces uncertainty and prevents unnecessary effort. Automated notifications, delivery updates, problem resolution alerts, and follow-up messages keep customers fully informed.

This builds trust and reduces future interactions because customers don’t need to chase information. Whether confirming payment status or updating support tickets, proactive messaging strengthens customer success and contributes to a more seamless overall experience.

Practical Applications for UK Businesses

Applying Customer Effort Score insights helps UK retailers, hospitality brands, and online service providers redesign the key moments that matter to your customers. By identifying friction in these journeys (whether digital or in person) businesses can streamline interactions, enhance satisfaction, and ultimately drive higher loyalty and conversion. 

Below are some examples to consider.

Examples from retail, hospitality and online services

CES can be used to diagnose and improve both physical and digital touchpoints across industries:

• Retail: Tesco uses clear store navigation, efficient click-and-collect flows and simplified customer service journeys to minimise effort.
  
• Hospitality: Premier Inn focuses on frictionless booking, mobile check-in and easy amendments. They also have a detailed FAQ page to answer many customer queries without having to talk to a support agent. This is ideal for applying CES to streamline stays and address common pain points.
  
• Online services: Monzo’s in-app support and automated FAQs are strong models for reducing customer effort through intuitive digital design.

Businesses can use CES data from these environments to adjust layouts, improve signage, streamline digital navigation, and simplify support flows. These changes help reduce customer effort across all channels.

Tying CES to payment and checkout experiences

For UK businesses, payments are one of the most critical places to reduce customer effort. 

CES can guide improvements such as:

• Low-effort billing and card machine interactions: Simple terminal prompts, fast contactless acceptance, portable card readers and clear digital receipts reduce friction at the point of sale (POS).
  
• Handling disputes, returns or declined transactions seamlessly: Providing easy-to-follow steps, transparent explanations and quick resolutions helps reduce stress and future contact.

By applying CES insights to payment processes, UK businesses can make purchases, refunds, and issue resolution require minimal customer effort.

Conclusion

The Customer Effort Score is a powerful metric for understanding how easy it is for customers to achieve what they need when interacting with your business.

By regularly measuring CES, analysing the results and applying targeted improvements, your business can reduce friction across support, onboarding, checkout and everyday service journeys.

Reducing customer effort strengthens loyalty, increases satisfaction, improves operational efficiency, and raises conversion rates.

For UK businesses seeking to deliver smoother, more intuitive experiences, focusing on CES is a strategic move that builds long-term customer trust and drives sustainable growth.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a good customer effort score?

A good CES generally reflects that customers find it easy to complete tasks, resolve issues or interact with your business. While benchmarks vary by industry, a strong CES typically means most customers select the lower-effort options on your scale. Higher scores indicate friction, so the goal is to consistently reduce the effort required across key touchpoints such as support, onboarding and post-purchase interactions.

How do you calculate a customer effort score?

To calculate CES, ask customers how easy it was to complete a specific task, then average all responses. Most businesses use a numbered scale (often 1 to 5 or 1 to 7) where lower numbers represent lower effort. Add all response values together and divide by the total number of respondents. This average score helps you determine friction levels and identify where processes or support interactions need improvement.

What is the 5-point effort scale?

A 5-point effort scale is a simple rating system used to measure how easy or difficult customers find a particular interaction. Customers select from five fixed points ranging from “very easy” to “very difficult.” It’s widely used because it provides quick, clear insights into where friction exists while keeping the survey short. The scale helps businesses pinpoint specific steps that need streamlining to improve overall customer experience.

What is a good effort score?

A good effort score is one where the majority of customers choose ratings at the “easy” or “very easy” end of your scale. While exact benchmarks differ by industry, lower scores usually indicate smoother experiences and fewer barriers to completion. If your score trends toward the “difficult” end, it signals a need to revisit processes, enhance support or simplify systems to reduce friction and improve customer satisfaction.

What is the customer effort score KPI?

The CES KPI tracks how much effort customers must exert to complete a task or interaction with your business. It reflects the ease of doing business with you and is often tied to critical touchpoints like onboarding, support or checkout. As a KPI, CES helps teams identify friction points, prioritise improvements and monitor the impact of process changes on overall customer experience.

What is the 80:20 rule in customer satisfaction?

The 80:20 rule, or Pareto Principle, suggests that 80% of customer satisfaction outcomes typically come from 20% of your efforts or interactions. In practice, it means a small number of touchpoints (such as onboarding or support) have the greatest impact on overall satisfaction. By identifying and optimising these high-impact areas, businesses can significantly improve customer experience without overhauling every part of their operation.