Definition
Customer Effort Score is a post-interaction survey metric. The canonical question is "How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?" with answers on a Likert scale where 1 is very low effort and 7 is very high effort — or, in the 5-point variant, 1 is very low and 5 is very high. Gartner's original 2013 formulation used a 7-point scale and the phrasing above; many teams now deploy a simpler 5-point "strongly disagree / strongly agree" on a statement like "The company made it easy for me to handle my issue."
CES is not trademarked. Formulas vary: report an average across respondents, or report the percentage of low-effort responses (1–3 on 7-point, 1–2 on 5-point). Always publish which scale and which formula you used; scores are not comparable across methods. CES is best read alongside the support ticket it relates to, so that a low score can be traced to the specific interaction, agent, and issue type rather than treated as an aggregate gauge.
Why it matters
CES was designed to answer a specific question that CSAT and Net Promoter Score do not answer well: did the company make this interaction harder than it needed to be? Gartner's research tied low-effort experiences to loyalty and repurchase — the argument being that removing friction matters more than producing delight on a service interaction.
For consumer brands with large support operations, CES complements CSAT. CSAT tells you whether the customer was satisfied with the outcome; CES tells you whether the path to that outcome was needlessly hard. A brand can have high CSAT and terrible CES — a customer eventually gets their refund but spends 40 minutes across three reps to do so — and only the CES score reveals the process cost.
Example
A consumer-electronics brand runs a post-interaction CES survey on every Zendesk ticket that closes. The question is on a 7-point scale, and the reported metric is "% low-effort" (1–3). Baseline is 62%. The Consumer Insights team segments CES by issue type and finds that "warranty claim" tickets score 41% low-effort against a 78% average for "how-to" tickets.
The team reads 200 warranty-claim transcripts in Gong and maps the process: customers get transferred between support, warranty, and returns an average of 2.4 times. The operations team redesigns the flow so the first agent owns the case end to end. Next quarter's warranty CES climbs to 68% low-effort. CSAT on warranty tickets also rises, but the CES signal was the early indicator.