Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how easy it is for customers to interact with your company, whether that’s making a purchase, getting support, or resolving an issue. 

Customers rate the ease of their experience on a scale (typically 1–5), and lower scores mean less effort.

By tracking CES, you can spot friction points in your customer journey, like a complicated checkout or slow support, and improve them. Research shows reducing effort is one of the best ways to build customer loyalty.

Customers who experience low-effort interactions are significantly more likely to remain loyal. Businesses can use CES to pinpoint areas in the customer journey where customers encounter friction, like during onboarding or after interactions with customer support. Using these insights, companies can then make targeted improvements to reduce churn and drive long-term relationships.

To start measuring customer effort today, try our CES survey template. Or, type a short prompt about your business and your goals in measuring CES, and let AI create a custom survey for you.

Look for CES survey software that makes it easy for you to get real-time feedback so that you can spot high-effort interactions and move fast to prevent churn. For example, with SurveyMonkey, you can set up real-time alerts with Slack or integrate with CRMs like Salesforce to automate customer follow-ups whenever you receive a low score. 

It’s also key to look for software that’s intuitive to use—both for your team, and for your customers. This will help increase response rates by making it quick and easy for your customers to complete your survey. And when CES survey platforms are easy to use, you’ll see higher adoption across teams that play a role in the customer experience, like operations and product. 

Explore all SurveyMonkey plan features today. 

CSAT focuses on measuring overall satisfaction, while CES typically focuses on the ease of specific interfactions. Customer Effort Score is measured immediately after a customer interaction with your brand, whereas CSAT is asked across a wider range of touchpoints. Businesses use both metrics to get a comprehensive picture of CX and identify where they need to improve processes.