What Is CES? Customer Effort Score Explained

What is CES, and what does it tell a B2B company?

Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how hard it was for a customer to get something done. You ask one question straight after a specific interaction, such as a support case, a data migration or a first invoice, and the answer shows where friction sits in your process.

That is the whole job of CES, and it is narrower than most guides admit. CES is a diagnostic for locating friction. It is not a forecast of who will renew. Used that way, it is one of the most practical metrics in a B2B program, because it points at a step in your own process that you can fix, and it does so months before a renewal conversation.

Where do the famous CES numbers come from, and what do they measure?

Matthew Dixon and colleagues at CEB (now Gartner) published "Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers" in Harvard Business Review in 2010. The argument was uncomfortable for anyone investing in wow moments: reducing effort builds more loyalty than exceeding expectations. CEB's later Effortless Experience research put numbers on it.

Source: Matthew Dixon, CEB (now Gartner), Effortless Experience research.

Read the table for what it is. These are the intentions customers reported after a customer service contact. They are not observed renewals, and the published figures do not separate out B2B account renewals. For an account book of a few dozen customers on annual contracts, that is a strong reason to measure effort. It is not proof that a score of 4 means a cancelled contract. Treat 96% as a reason to look for friction, not as a churn rate.

How does the CES question work?

The standard CES question is a statement, not a question: "The company made it easy for me to handle my issue." Customers answer on a 7-point scale, where 1 means strongly disagree (high effort) and 7 means strongly agree (low effort). A common variant asks "How easy was it to resolve your issue today?" Either works. Pick one and keep it, because changing the wording breaks your trend line.

The direction is where most dashboards go wrong. If you ask for agreement with "The company made it easy", a score of 5.2 out of 7 is above the midpoint and leans positive. If you ask "How much effort did this take?" and 7 means a lot of effort, the same 5.2 is a warning sign. Before you compare your CES with anyone else's, or with your own number from last quarter, confirm which way your scale points. Teams that switch survey tool or rephrase the question mid-year have compared two incompatible numbers more than once.

How do you calculate CES?

CES is the average score across all responses. Five customers who score 6, 7, 5, 4 and 6 give (6 + 7 + 5 + 4 + 6) / 5 = 5.6. A high score means low effort, which is the opposite of how most people read a red number, so make sure the whole organisation reads the scale the same way.

The average is the least useful part. Look at the distribution. Take a hypothetical example from Nordika A/S: 40 customers answer after the data migration step and the average is 5.4. If 28 of them score 5-7, 4 score 4 and 8 score 1-3, then one in five customers had a hard time. A second step with the same 5.4 average where only 2 of 40 score 1-3 is a different situation. The first calls for action on that step this week. The second does not. Report the share scoring 1-3 next to the average, every time.

Where does CES belong in a B2B program?

CES is a transactional metric. It measures friction at specific moments, so trigger it after the interaction, not as a quarterly blast to everyone. It is not a relationship metric. For that, use NPS and read transactional vs. relational NPS to keep the two apart.

Most CES advice is written for a single support ticket or a checkout. In B2B the costliest effort sits earlier and runs longer: onboarding. It is also the easiest place to measure effort well, because the friction shows up in a few concrete steps. Retently calls stages where friction reliably piles up "effort hotspots", and the idea works well for account-based programs: map CES to each step instead of asking one blended "how was onboarding?" at the end.

A B2B onboarding survey built around milestones will surface which hotspot to fix first. Feed the result into a customer health score so a rising effort score is read next to usage and support data, not alone. Where you only have a handful of respondents per account, read B2B survey sampling with a small n before you draw conclusions from a single score.

Do not use CES for brand perception, emotional connection or long-term loyalty. It is a scalpel, not a strategy.

How does CES compare with CSAT and NPS?

A customer can be satisfied with an outcome and still have had a painful route to it. Imagine a hypothetical Nordika A/S contact who rates a support case 4 out of 5 on CSAT because the issue was solved, but needed three transfers and two days to get there, and answers 2 out of 7 on CES. CSAT says the process works. CES says it does not. For the full comparison, see NPS vs. CSAT vs. CES.

What is a good CES score?

There is no reliable answer, and anyone who gives you a number should show the source. CustomerGauge's comparison of the three metrics (10 September 2026) says it plainly: "Unlike NPS, CSAT and CES lack standardized cross-industry benchmarks." Retently makes the same point in its CES guide: benchmarking against competitors is difficult because there is no clear industry-wide standard. We therefore do not publish industry averages here, because we cannot source them.

The adoption data explains why the benchmarks are thin. CustomerGauge found that 49% of NPS users also measure at least one more metric, that over 33% add CSAT, and that roughly one in six add CES (CustomerGauge, 2026). In CustomerGauge's 2021 benchmark of 776 B2B companies, only 11% named CES the metric they trusted most, against 41% for NPS and 26% for CSAT (reported by CustomerGauge, 28 August 2026).

What to use instead: your own baseline per milestone, the share scoring 1-3, and the trend after you change something. A step that moves from 20% to 5% in the bottom group has improved, whatever the average says.

Does CES predict churn?

Not on its own, and this is where most CES guides oversell. The CEB/Gartner research links effort to what customers say they will do after a service contact. We are not aware of a published B2B study that ties CES to actual renewals, and CustomerGauge's own comparison states that CSAT does not predict renewal or repeat purchase, which is a reminder that single-score claims need testing.

So test it on your own accounts. Run CES alongside NPS and CSAT through key driver analysis and see whether effort is the metric that actually moves loyalty at account level, or whether you are fixing the wrong thing. The case for CES does not depend on it being a perfect predictor. It depends on it being the fastest way to find a broken step.

What do we see in practice, and which mistakes cost the most?

Onboarding effort is the earliest warning. In B2B, a contract can hide effort for a year. A customer who struggled through data migration will still pay the first invoice. Measuring effort at day 7 and day 30 of onboarding lets you intervene before the customer disengages quietly. By the time a quarterly NPS survey arrives, the decision may already be made.

Self-service is underused as a CES target. Most companies build a knowledge base and assume it works. Measuring effort after a self-service session shows whether people found the answer or gave up and called support.

Mistake: treating CES as a relationship metric. A quarterly CES survey to the whole customer base answers nothing. Trigger it after specific interactions.

Mistake: reading only the average. See the Nordika A/S example above. The bottom group is where the risk sits.

Mistake: skipping the follow-up question. A score says effort was high, not why. Always add one open question: "What could we have done to make this easier?" The open text is usually richer than the score, and it is exactly the high-volume, low-structure feedback that AI text analytics can sort as it arrives instead of in a quarterly batch. Then close the loop with the customer who scored low.

Mistake: measuring without an owner. If nobody owns the score for a process, nobody improves it. Name an owner for each milestone before you start.

How do you reduce customer effort?

Remove steps, then remove hand-offs. In most B2B processes, that covers five moves.

1. Invest in self-service that answers the question. A knowledge base that does not resolve the question costs more than none, because the customer arrives at support already frustrated.
2. Remove unnecessary steps. Walk through your most important customer paths and ask what can be pre-filled, merged or dropped. Every extra approval, form field and login is effort.
3. Reduce hand-offs. Being passed between people is among the most effortful things a customer experiences. Track first-contact resolution and give people the mandate to resolve without escalation. See how to deliver great customer service.
4. Communicate before they ask. Status updates, known-issue notices and onboarding checklists prevent contacts that would otherwise be made in frustration.
5. Test the flows on a phone. A growing share of interactions happen on mobile, so clumsy flows create effort for a large part of your users.

Friction is also a churn driver that is cheap to fix compared with winning customers back, which is the logic behind how to reduce churn.

How does SurveyGauge work with CES?

We run CES at milestone level inside the same program as NPS and CSAT, so effort sits next to loyalty and satisfaction for the same account. Each low score gets a named owner and a follow-up, and the open-text comments are tagged as they arrive. The point is not another dashboard number. It is knowing which step to fix first, and who is fixing it.

Start with the two or three moments that matter most to your customers, such as first login and data migration. Ask the same statement every time, report the share scoring 1-3 next to the average, and name an owner for each step.