Customer Effort Score (CES) is a single-item metric that measures how much effort a customer has to exert to get an issue resolved, a request fulfilled, a product purchased/returned or a question answered.

CES surveys typically ask the question, “on a scale of ‘very easy’ to ‘very difficult’, how easy was it to interact with [company name].” The idea is that customers are more loyal to a product or service that is easier to use.

CES score is calculated by adding the total CES scores of respondents divided by the number of respondents.