Customer Effort Score (CES)

What is Customer Effort Score?

Customer Effort Score (CES) is a customer satisfaction metric used to measure the ease of interaction/experience with a product or service. Typically, customers are asked to rate the ease of using products or services on a 7-point scale of “very difficult” to “very easy”. A higher CES doesn’t necessarily indicate a satisfied customer or predict their loyalty.

Why it is important 

Gathering the CES from your customers soon after they finish the onboarding process helps you prioritize initiatives to improve the customer experience in the future.  

Especially for customer onboarding, CES is a better choice than NPS because smooth and low-effort onboarding correlates more closely with retention. 

Best practices

Use your CES to figure out:  

1. Things customers need to know or be able to do before onboarding
2. The best way to convey this information or build the skills required: training, in-product assistance, documentation/manuals, etc. 
3. Tasks you can complete before you initiate onboarding 
4. What customers perceive as the first value delivered 
5. Any information loss happening in the handoff from Sales to Customer Success