What is customer effort score?
Customer effort score, or CES, measures how much effort a customer had to put in to get what they needed, usually to resolve an issue or complete a task. It is built on a simple idea: reducing effort keeps customers more reliably than trying to delight them.
It is typically asked as agreement with a statement like the company made it easy to handle my issue, on a 1 to 7 scale. Higher means easier.
The CES formula.
There are two common forms. The average method takes the mean of all responses on the 1 to 7 scale. The percent method reports the share of customers who chose the easy end of the scale. This calculator does both.
Pick one and stay with it. The average is the classic CES; the percent-easy version is simpler to explain to a wider audience.
A worked example.
Across 100 responses, the scores sum to 520, so the average CES is 5.2 on the 1 to 7 scale. If 80 of those 100 chose the easy end, the percent-easy CES is 80%.
What is a good CES?
On the 1 to 7 average, aim for 5.5 and up, which signals genuinely low effort. On the percent-easy version, 80% and above is strong. Either way, the direction matters more than the absolute: a rising score means you are removing friction.
Effort and satisfaction track together. A low CES usually shows up as a lower CSAT on the same touchpoint, so read them as a pair.
How to improve your CES.
Cut the number of steps and contacts needed, make self-service answers easy to find, and remove repeated explanations and handoffs. Every avoided step lowers effort.
Many high-effort moments start with unclear information before the customer ever contacts you. See how we reduce effort with clear content.