Growing up, we’re often encouraged to “make an effort” — whether in sports, school, or life — with the promise that hard work will pay off. The same principle applies to customer service. In business, we must put in maximum effort behind the scenes so that working with us feels effortless for the customer.

That’s why the customer effort score (CES) exists: to help us ensure that interacting with our company or brand is as easy as possible. We don’t want our customers to work hard, so we have to work harder.

Now, let’s take a closer look at what CES measures, how it can guide your customer interactions, and what steps you can take to improve your score. The easier you make the experience, the longer your customers will likely stay.

Main Takeaways

• Customer effort score (CES) is a metric developed nearly 20 years ago by Gartner Research to help businesses measure how easy it is for customers to interact with them. Customer effort is a key factor in driving customer loyalty.
• CES data is collected through a customer effort score survey. Customers should be asked to complete this short survey immediately following an interaction with your business, such as a customer service call, marketing conversion, or purchase.
• To improve CES, focus on reducing customer effort. Train agents to be more proactive, eliminate high-effort pain points like long hold times and broken web links, and use technology, including AI tools, to help streamline the customer journey.
• By understanding what CES measures and taking steps to improve it, your business can boost revenue, strengthen customer loyalty, and create a smoother, more satisfying customer experience.

What Is the Customer Effort Score (CES)?

Customer effort score measures how easy you make it for customers to engage with your company or brand. The concept was first introduced in a 2010 Harvard Business Review article by a group now part of Gartner Research.

CES is typically measured through a simple survey — the kind you might receive after placing an online order, making a payment over the phone, or checking your bank balance. Businesses collect these survey responses to calculate their customer effort score.

But why measure effort at all? Simply put, the harder you make it for customers to engage with you, the less likely they are to stick around. On the other hand, customers who find it easy to work with your business are far more likely to stay loyal — and loyalty helps drive growth.

How to Measure and Calculate Customer Effort Score

Tracking customer effort score (CES) is relatively straightforward. Here are three simple steps to collect CES data effectively:

1. Create a Customer Effort Score Survey

Start by designing a simple CES survey. It should focus on a single, specific question that gets to the heart of the customer’s experience. For example: How easy was it for you to get the help you needed?

This survey should be delivered immediately after the interaction, whether through a screen or chat pop-up, a follow-up text or email, or an automated prompt at the end of a phone call.

You can also tailor the single question to address specific interactions. So, if the customer just visited your website to get a quote for car insurance, you might ask: How easy was it for you to get a satisfactory insurance quote for your vehicle today?

Customers respond on a scale of 1 to 7 (1 = extremely disagree, 7 = strongly agree). Scores above 5 are presented as a percentage. If 78 respondents score 5 and above out of 122, the CES score is 63.9%.

Some companies also customise surveys for live chat experiences by offering customers a choice of emoticons to express how easy the interaction felt, making the process quick, intuitive, and engaging.

2. The Customer Effort Score Calculation

Let’s say you take the traditional CES survey approach, as recommended by Gartner, and ask your customers to rate the effort required on a scale from 1 to 7. You would calculate CES by dividing the sum of all responses by the total number of responses. So, if you survey 100 customers and the total of their scores adds up to 500, then your CES score would be 5.

The most common way to interpret CES scores is like this:

• Low score (1-2) → High customer effort, poor customer experience
• Mid score (3-4) → Neutral
• High score (5-7) → Low customer effort, great customer experience

Generally, you want to aim for scores over 5. Scores below 5 indicate that customers are encountering excessive friction, and it’s time to take action to streamline and enhance the experience.

3. Benchmark and Track CES Trends

Once you have your customer effort score, what’s next? Start by compiling scores over time to build a clear, ongoing picture of customer effort. Tracking these scores helps you identify trends and uncover actionable insights.

It’s also important to benchmark your CES against industry averages, but proceed with caution. Not all companies use the same scoring format. Some may use a 1–5 scale instead of 1–7, while others might reverse the scale entirely (with 1 representing high satisfaction and 5 or 7 representing dissatisfaction).

To help ensure your benchmarking is meaningful, make sure you’re comparing apples to apples — otherwise, the data can lead you in the wrong direction.

5 Ways to Improve Your Customer Effort Score (CES)

Let’s suppose that your CES score is 4.9/7. It’s not bad, but it’s not where you want it to be. Ideally, you want to achieve a score of 5.9 or higher. Here’s how to start closing that gap:

1. Identify High-Effort Touchpoints

Pinpointing the moments where customers encounter the most friction is one of the fastest ways to boost your CES. For example, if a broken link on your website prevents customers from completing a transaction, that’s a simple fix — if you know it’s happening.

You can ask for customer feedback and conduct surveys to identify high-effort touchpoints. However, frustrated customers don’t always take the time to complain — they often just leave.

Here’s where analytics tools can help. You can use AI-powered call analytics, such as Invoca’s conversation intelligence, to fill information gaps. AI analyses call interactions at scale and pinpoints keywords that indicate problems, such as when callers mention a “broken link.” Invoca’s AI also conducts sentiment analysis to detect changes in a customer’s voice over the phone that might indicate frustration or lack of interest.

This kind of proactive insight can help you catch issues early, before customers slip away.

2. Optimise Self-Service and Digital Channels

A seamless customer journey starts with flexibility. That means offering omnichannel support so customers can connect with you in the way that suits them best — whether that’s live chat, social media, email, or phone.

You can also reduce effort by offering AI-powered self-service tools, such as chatbots or voice assistants like Alexa and Siri. They can address simple or common requests from customers, which means customers don’t have to be placed on hold or channeled into a queue. 

Lastly, you can optimise self-service options for customers by routinely checking the customer journey on your website. Make the navigation clear, easy, and as user-friendly as possible. 

3. Reduce Effort in Customer Service Calls

When customers don’t choose the digital self-service option, you must make customer service over the phone as efficient as possible. This should start as soon as a call comes in by using intelligent call routing to immediately deliver the call to the right agent or department. This reduces call handling time by eliminating the need for excessive holds or transfers.

You can further reduce transfers with conversational interactive voice response (IVR) software. Conversational IVR uses automation to prequalify calls through human-like voice interactions. Conversational IVR is also available to callers 24/7. 

A third tool that helps reduce customer effort in phone communication is Invoca’s PreSense, which delivers insights to agents gathered from customers’ pre-call digital journeys. Before an agent even picks up a call, they can access details such as the caller’s name and the webpage they were on when they called the contact centre. This reduces the need for customers to repeat information, thereby speeding up calls.

4. Proactively Address Customer Issues

A lower CES score often reflects missed opportunities to solve customer problems before they escalate. That’s why encouraging a proactive mindset among your agents is key.

It starts with strong onboarding and coaching, backed by continuous training incorporating real-world scenarios. Conversation intelligence tools make this easier — by pulling real examples from transcripts and call recordings, you can train agents to spot friction points early and take the initiative.

Automated quality management can further support this effort. By scoring agent performance at scale, QA tools provide a clear, data-driven view of how agents handle customer interactions — and whether they’re taking proactive steps or simply reacting. If passivity shows up in the data, you can refocus training where it matters most.

AI-driven conversation analytics tools from Invoca can even detect shifts in sentiment from both customers and agents during phone calls. With sentiment analysis, managers can improve agent training and coaching by identifying exactly where a conversation went off track and suggesting ways for agents to better manage similar situations in the future.

5. Close the Feedback Loop

Lastly, you can improve CES by reacting quickly to customers’ concerns. Every customer should receive a response when they contact you. However, it is essential to reach out to dissatisfied customers promptly. Rapid responses that resolve issues quickly help avoid lingering problems that can tarnish your brand’s reputation.   

You should also stay up to date with CES trends and regularly review call analytics to identify areas where agents can enhance the customer journey and reduce customer effort. 

For example, say that a bank determines from its call analytics that customers reaching out to customer service often hang up after just a few minutes on hold. In response, the customer service director might implement an automated callback option, reducing frustration and making the experience feel more effortless.

Why Understanding Your CES Score Is Crucial for Success

Success! You’ve implemented the five CES strategies, and now your score has climbed north of 5.9. So, what does that actually mean for your business?

Predictor of Customer Loyalty

Your CES score can directly reflect customer loyalty. In fact, the research that led Gartner to develop this metric revealed that 96% of customers who experienced high-effort interactions — such as being transferred multiple times or having to repeat themselves — reported disloyalty.

By contrast, only 9% of customers who had low-effort interactions said they’d leave a brand, and 94% said they’d buy again. In other words, making things easy builds customer loyalty and that helps drive repeat business.

CES vs. Other Metrics (NPS, CSAT)

That last stat is one reason CES is often seen as a stronger predictor of future buying behavior than metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS). But that doesn’t mean it’s a stand-alone solution.

NPS excels at measuring long-term brand loyalty and advocacy, while Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) captures overall satisfaction with a product or service. CES, by contrast, zeroes in on the effort required to complete an interaction.

Used together, these metrics provide a more comprehensive and nuanced view of the customer experience — one that can help you better target improvements and measure their impact.

Direct Impact on Revenue

CES also has a clear connection to the bottom line. High-effort experiences lead to higher customer acquisition costs (CAC), which can hurt revenue.

On the other hand, if you make it more effortless for customers to do business with you, they will present a higher customer lifetime value (CLV). That’s revenue you keep — and grow — without needing to constantly replace lost business.

Competitive Advantage

It’s not just revenue that can improve with a better CES. Businesses that prioritise frictionless experiences are better positioned to outperform competitors in both customer experience and retention. In high-stakes industries like financial services, minimising customer effort can be a powerful advantage.

Improve Customer Experience and Boost Customer Satisfaction with Invoca

Strategies like intelligent call routing reduce friction by connecting callers to the right department or agent the first time, cutting hold times and avoiding frustrating transfers. Tools like Invoca’s PreSense bridge digital and voice channels, giving agents real-time insight into a caller’s browsing behavior and intent. That means no more repeating information — just personalised, seamless service from the first “hello.”

See how Invoca PreSense works in the short video below:

With AI-powered analytics from 100% of your calls, Invoca can help you pinpoint where friction is creeping in or customer effort is rising, so you can take action fast. Your agents can respond more proactively, and customers enjoy smoother, faster resolutions.

In short, with Invoca, you can continuously improve customer effort scores and feel more confident that your business is delivering experiences that will keep customers coming back.

Additional Reading

To learn more about how Invoca’s AI-driven quality intelligence tools can help you smooth the customer journey and increase CES, check out these resources:

• 10 Innovative Ideas to Improve Customer Service
• Customer Care: Definition, Importance, and 8 Essential Tips
• Top Customer Experience KPIs to Measure for Success 

Why not book a free demo to learn how Invoca can help you achieve better customer effort scores? Reach out today to schedule one with our team.

FAQs

What Is a Good Customer Effort Score?

What qualifies as a “good” customer effort score (CES) depends on the scale your business uses. Gartner recommends a 1–7 scale, though many organisations still use a 1–5 range. In both cases, higher scores indicate lower effort — and that’s the goal.

On a 1–7 scale, a CES above 5 is considered strong. On a 1–5 scale, anything above 3 generally signals a good experience with minimal friction.

What Is the Best Time to Send a CES Survey?

The best time to send a CES survey is immediately after the customer interaction you want to measure, while the experience is still fresh in their mind.

For example, if a customer completes an online purchase, the survey should appear right after checkout. If they call your service centre, the agent can prompt them to complete a brief verbal or touch-tone survey as soon as the issue is resolved.

Timely feedback ensures more accurate responses and helps you pinpoint exactly where the experience can be improved.

What Is the Difference Between CSAT and Customer Effort Score (CES)?

The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) measures a customer’s level of satisfaction with a brand, product, or service. It reflects overall sentiment — are customers happy with the service they received, the value they got, and how responsive the company was?

Customer effort score (CES), on the other hand, focuses on ease. It measures the effort a customer had to exert during an interaction. Was the experience smooth and straightforward, or were there obstacles that created frustration?

While CSAT captures general satisfaction, CES focuses on specific areas of friction. Used together — and alongside other metrics, such as the Net Promoter Score (NPS) — they help create a more comprehensive and actionable view of the customer experience.