What is customer effort score?

Customer effort score (CES), explained

CES was introduced in a 2010 Harvard Business Review article by Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman and Nicholas Toman, “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers”. The authors argued that reducing customer effort does more for loyalty than exceeding expectations, and presented CES as a better predictor of loyalty than satisfaction measures.

There is no single official scale. Common versions ask customers to agree or disagree with an ease statement on a 1–5 or 1–7 scale, or to rate how easy the interaction was. Teams then report either the average score or the share of customers who found it easy.

Effort is created by the things support teams often overlook: repeating information after a transfer, switching channels, being asked for details the business already has, or having to come back because the first answer was incomplete.

For chat and AI support, the biggest effort drivers are dead-end bot loops, handoffs that lose context and answers that send the customer off to read a long page. Measuring CES right after a conversation, and reading low-scoring transcripts, points directly at which of these to fix.

How to measure it

Pick one method and scale and keep it fixed; averages and percentages are not comparable.

Common mistake

How SuperBot relates

SuperBot does not report a CES figure. What it does to reduce effort: answers in the widget, verifies order lookups against the customer's email instead of asking for extra detail, and hands off with the full transcript so customers do not repeat themselves.

• Human handoff rules that keep an AI agent from annoying customers

Related terms

• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) measures how satisfied customers are with a specific interaction, usually from a one-question survey such as “How satisfied were you with this conversation?” on a 1–5 scale. CSAT is the percentage of respondents who choose the top ratings, typically 4 or 5, out of everyone who responded.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer loyalty by asking how likely someone is to recommend a company to a friend or colleague on a 0–10 scale. Scores of 9–10 are promoters, 7–8 passives and 0–6 detractors. NPS is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors, giving a result from −100 to +100.
• First contact resolution (FCR)First contact resolution (FCR) is the percentage of customer issues fully resolved in the first interaction, with no follow-up, transfer or repeat contact needed. It is one of the most customer-centred support metrics because having to contact a business again about the same problem is a common source of frustration.
• Human handoff (escalation)Human handoff is the point where an automated system such as a chatbot passes a conversation to a person, ideally with the full conversation history and context attached. Good handoff rules trigger on low confidence, sensitive topics, explicit requests for a human or signs of frustration, and tell the customer what happens next and how long it will take.
• Self-service supportSelf-service support lets customers find answers and complete tasks on their own, without contacting a support agent, using tools such as a help centre, FAQs, order tracking pages, account settings and AI chat. Done well, it is faster for customers and cheaper for businesses; done badly, it becomes a barrier between customers and help.

Sources

1. Dixon, Freeman and Toman, “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers”, Harvard Business Review, July–August 2010