Customer Effort Score (CES) measures the effort customers invest in recent interactions with a company, assessing the ease of doing business with that organisation. 

CES has gained popularity in contact centres as it emphasises the importance of minimising customer effort as a stronger predictor of loyalty and positive outcomes over the level of service delivered by a contact centre agent. A high CES not only forecasts loyalty but also correlates with future purchasing behaviour and the likelihood of customers recommending the business (NPS). CES is easy to measure with specialist CES contact centre software that can automate the collection of CES data.

Customer Effort Score is best used in conjunction with other customer experience metrics to obtain a comprehensive view of customer sentiment. The score is acquired by asking customers a simple question immediately after a service interaction, typically on a seven-point scale, from “Strongly Agree” to “Strongly Disagree,” to evaluate the ease of issue resolution.