What is Customer Effort Score (CES)?

Table of contents

Why CES Matters in SaaS CX

How to Measure CES

Strategic Ways to Measure CES in SaaS

Final Thought

FAQs

related metrics

TL;DR

CES quantifies how effortless customers find key interactions with your B2B SaaS product or support. It's a critical, often overlooked, predictor: high customer effort directly correlates to churn and stalled adoption, even for "satisfied" users. By pinpointing friction, CES gives your CX, Product, and Revenue teams actionable insights to reduce struggles, drive higher adoption, and safeguard long-term retention without scaling costs.

Customer Effort Score (CES) is a focused CX metric that quantifies how easy it is for a customer to complete a specific task when engaging with your company. That task might be resolving a support issue, finding the right documentation, navigating a product workflow, or completing a transaction.

The most common method of collecting CES is through a short survey sent immediately after an interaction. It asks a single, pointed question:

"How easy was it to accomplish what you needed?"

Customers respond on a 5- or 7-point Likert scale, where higher scores reflect lower perceived effort. The result is a clear, quantifiable view into the level of friction customers are experiencing at key moments in their journey.

In a B2B SaaS environment, this isn't just about user experience—it's about operational clarity. CES surfaces actionable insights into where customers struggle, often before those struggles turn into escalations, churn, or stalled product adoption. It complements broader sentiment metrics like CSAT and NPS by isolating one of the most critical drivers of long-term loyalty: ease of use.

Why CES Matters in SaaS CX

While satisfaction (CSAT) and loyalty (NPS) are important, CES zeroes in on friction—often the root cause behind churn and support volume. Here's why it's essential:

Predictive of Churn: Customers who find it hard to resolve issues are more likely to leave, even if they're "satisfied."
Operational Focus: CES gives actionable signals to CX, Support, and Product teams about what's broken in the customer journey.
Scalable Improvement: Unlike sentiment-based metrics, CES points to specific processes, interfaces, or interactions that need optimization.

How to Measure CES

Measuring Customer Effort Score (CES) starts with a single, purpose-built survey question, typically triggered immediately after a customer interaction:

"How easy was it to resolve your issue today?"

Respondents answer using a Likert scale—usually 1 to 5 or 1 to 7—where:

On a 5-point scale: 1 = Very Difficult, 5 = Very Easy
On a 7-point scale: 1 = Very Difficult, 7 = Very Easy

Higher scores consistently indicate less perceived effort. This keeps the feedback focused, fast, and frictionless to collect.

To calculate your CES, the most common approach is to compute the average score:

CES (Average Score)=Total number of responsesSum of all individual response scores

The result gives you an average effort score across a defined set of interactions, channels, or cohorts. For example, if using a 7-point scale, an average score of 5.5 indicates a relatively easy experience.

Alternatively, a highly actionable method is to report the percentage of "easy" experiences. This focuses on the proportion of customers who found the task effortless. For a 7-point scale, scores of 6 and 7 are typically considered "easy":

CES (Percentage Easy)=Total number of responsesNumber of responses with a score of 6 or 7×100%

But the real value comes from how you segment and analyze the data.

Strategic Ways to Measure CES in SaaS

By channel: Compare CES across chat, email, self-service, or in-app workflows to uncover weak points in service delivery.
By customer segment: Identify whether new customers, enterprise accounts, or at-risk users are encountering more friction.
By interaction type: Evaluate effort across common tasks—onboarding steps, integration setup, renewal workflows—to pinpoint where customers need smoother paths.

Final Thought

In SaaS, customer loyalty is often won or lost in the micro-moments — a failed login, a confusing workflow, a delayed support response. These aren’t dramatic failures, but subtle friction points that quietly erode trust and momentum.

Customer Effort Score (CES) shines a light on those moments. It gives CX, product, and support teams a focused, quantifiable way to surface and remove friction before it turns into churn or stalled adoption.

For organizations aiming to scale customer experience without scaling cost, CES isn’t just a metric — it’s a signal for where your business needs to work smarter.

FAQs

Is CES more important than CSAT?

Not always, but CES is often a better predictor of future behavior, especially when it comes to retention and referrals.

What’s a “good” CES benchmark?

Scores above 4.0 (on a 5-point scale) or 6.0 (on a 7-point scale) are generally strong—but it’s more important to monitor trends and segment performance over time.

How often should we measure CES?

Ideally, after every meaningful interaction — especially support tickets, onboarding steps, or high-impact product workflows. The goal is to collect enough context-specific data to guide actionable improvements, not just pulse sentiment.

Can CES be used in product-led growth (PLG) motions?

Yes. In PLG environments, CES is especially valuable for measuring ease across self-serve touchpoints like sign-up flows, feature discovery, and in-app guidance. It can help reduce friction without scaling headcount.

Can CES influence renewal or expansion strategies?

Absolutely. CES can act as an early signal for at-risk accounts or stalled adoption. If high-effort interactions are concentrated in strategic accounts, it’s a cue for proactive support or success interventions — long before renewal is on the table.