GlossaryMetrics & Measurement
CES (Customer Effort Score)
A measure of how much work the customer had to do to get their problem solved.
CES flips the satisfaction question toward friction: "How easy was it to handle your issue?", usually on a 1-5 or 1-7 agree/disagree scale. The premise, drawn from the effort-reduction research, is that customers churn from hard experiences more reliably than they fall in love with delightful ones.
You report it as an average score or a top-box percentage.
What it hides: effort is subjective and phrasing-sensitive — a reworded question can swing the number more than an actual process change. And a low-effort interaction can still leave the underlying problem unsolved; easy is not the same as resolved.