Definition
Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how much effort a customer must exert to accomplish a specific task with your product or service. Introduced in a 2010 Harvard Business Review article titled "Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers," CES is based on the research finding that reducing customer effort is a stronger driver of loyalty than exceeding customer expectations.
The typical CES survey asks a single question after a specific interaction: "How easy was it to [accomplish X]?" on a scale of 1 (very difficult) to 7 (very easy). Unlike NPS, which measures overall sentiment, CES is interaction-specific. You measure CES after a support call, after completing onboarding, after upgrading a plan, or after using a specific feature for the first time.
Why It Matters for Product Managers
CES is one of the most actionable metrics a PM can track because it directly identifies friction in specific product experiences. A low CES score on your onboarding flow tells you exactly where to invest. A high CES score on your core workflow confirms that your product design is working.
The research behind CES is compelling: 96% of customers who had high-effort experiences reported being disloyal (compared to 9% of low-effort customers). Effort is a stronger predictor of churn than satisfaction or delight. This means PMs should prioritize removing friction over adding features -- a counterintuitive insight that conflicts with the typical roadmap pressure to build new things.
Amazon's 1-Click ordering, Apple's Face ID, and Slack's "just paste the link and it unfurls" design are all examples of products obsessively minimizing customer effort. These weren't technically difficult features to build, but they required product teams to prioritize effort reduction as a strategic goal rather than treating it as a nice-to-have.
How It Works in Practice
Identify high-effort moments -- Map your core user journeys and flag every point where users might struggle: onboarding steps, feature configuration, billing changes, support interactions, data export. These are your CES measurement candidates.
Deploy in-context surveys -- Trigger CES surveys immediately after the interaction you're measuring. Use in-app surveys, not email follow-ups, to capture accurate responses. Keep it to one question plus an optional open-text "what would have made this easier?" follow-up.
Benchmark by interaction type -- A CES of 5.5/7 might be excellent for a complex configuration task but poor for a simple form submission. Compare CES scores within interaction types, not across them. Track trends over time more than absolute numbers.
Combine with behavioral data -- CES tells you how easy users perceived the task. Behavioral data tells you how easy it actually was (time-on-task, error rate, support ticket creation). When perception and reality diverge, investigate -- users might think a flow is easy because they've learned workarounds, but new users might struggle significantly.
Act on low scores -- CES is only valuable if it drives improvement. For each low-scoring interaction, identify the top friction points from open-text responses, redesign the experience, and re-measure. Run usability tests to validate changes before shipping.
Common Pitfalls
Surveying too frequently. Asking CES after every interaction causes survey fatigue and tanks response rates. Sample 10-20% of users and rotate which interaction you measure each week or month.
Averaging CES across all interactions. A single CES number for your entire product is meaningless. The value is in comparing scores across specific interactions to find and fix the highest-friction ones.
Ignoring the "effort" that CES misses. CES measures perceived effort for a completed task. It doesn't capture the effort of tasks users abandon before completing -- those users never see the survey. Complement CES with funnel drop-off analysis to catch silent friction.
Using CES to measure feature satisfaction. CES measures ease, not value. A feature can be easy to use but not useful. Pair CES with adoption and outcome metrics to get the full picture.
Related Concepts
CES and NPS complement each other -- NPS captures overall loyalty while CES pinpoints friction in specific interactions. High CES directly correlates with better retention rates, since customers who find a product easy to use are significantly less likely to churn. Regular usability testing helps identify the specific UX issues that drive low CES scores, turning a metric into an improvement roadmap.
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