CES (Customer Effort Score) is a KPI that measures customer's experience with a product or a service. The CES score is about how much effort was required to use the specific product or service.

CES survey question could be, for instance:

      The company made it easy for me to solve my issue.

It would also be possible to ask a customer:

To what extend do you agree or disagree with the following statement.

"The company made it easy for me to handle my issue."

After both questions, a customer answers on a scale "very difficult" or "very easy" or something between. 

CES reveals the pain points in the customer interactions. The tool can be used after a customer's issue is solved, for instance, after a call, a chat or a service. By asking customer satisfaction surveys, it is also easy for the company to start developing its processes and improve customer loyalty based on the customer feedback data.

The main idea of CES is to get insights of the processes and experiences the customers go through so the process can be improved to be as effortless as possible. CES is not the tool to provide information about business overall or the customer desires or challenges. For those cases, there can be utilized other customer experience KPI's, such as NPS® or CSAT. You can read more about NPS® here, and CSAT here.

The calculation of CES is a simple average. So you add up the values of all responses and divide it by the total number of responses.

If 345 people responded to your CES survey, and the total sum of their responses is 1543, your CES score would be 4.5. Depending on your scale system (whether you are using a 5 or 7-point system), the quality of this score varies.

Wan't to learn more? Read about KPI’s in our blog.