A metric measuring how much effort a customer had to expend to accomplish a specific task or resolve an issue, typically gathered via a survey asking respondents to rate how easy or difficult an interaction was.
Why it matters
Research behind CES suggests that reducing customer effort is often a stronger driver of loyalty than trying to delight customers with extra, unrequested effort — CES gives a direct way to measure and track whether a specific process is actually getting easier over time.
In a sentence
"We redesigned the returns process specifically to lower CES, since customers had been telling us in surveys that it took far too many steps."
Related terms
- Often confused with: CSAT (CES specifically measures perceived effort or difficulty; CSAT measures overall satisfaction with an interaction, which can be high even if some effort was required, or low even if the interaction was easy but the outcome was disappointing).