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    Customer Effort Score (CES)

    Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how much effort a customer expended to complete a specific interaction, typically on a 7-point agree/disagree scale.

    CES was developed by CEB (now Gartner) and outperforms CSAT and NPS for predicting customer loyalty in service interactions. The validated CES 2.0 wording is: '[Company] made it easy for me to handle my issue.' on a 7-point Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree scale. Per Gartner research, 94% of low-effort customers said they would repurchase, versus only 4% of high-effort customers — the largest predictive gap of any common CX metric.

    Formula

    CES = average rating across all respondents (1-7 scale)

    Example

    A good CES is above 5.5. A score above 6 is excellent. Refiner 2026 average post-support CES: 5.0-5.5.

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    Related terms

    Net Promoter Score (NPS)

    Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer loyalty by asking how likely customers are to recommend a product or service on a 0-10 scale.

    Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

    Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) measures how satisfied customers are with a product, service, or interaction on a 1-5 or 1-10 scale.

    Survey Response Rate

    Response rate is the percentage of invited respondents who completed (or at least started) a survey.

    Survey Completion Rate

    Completion rate is the percentage of survey starters who finished all questions.

    Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)

    eNPS adapts NPS to measure how likely employees are to recommend their employer as a place to work.

    Customer Lifetime Value (CLV / LTV)

    Customer Lifetime Value (CLV or LTV) is the total revenue (or gross profit) a business expects to earn from a customer over the entire relationship.