Customer Effort Score Calculator

About this calculator

Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how easy or hard it was for a customer to get their issue resolved, usually collected with a post-interaction survey asking respondents to rate effort on a 1-7 scale (“How easy was it to resolve your issue?”). The overall CES is the average of all responses, but customer experience teams also track the share of “low-effort” responses (typically the top two scores) separately, since a high average can hide a meaningful chunk of frustrated customers.

Support teams and CX researchers favor CES over satisfaction scores because research (originally from Gartner/CEB) found effort is a stronger predictor of customer loyalty than satisfaction — customers who have to work hard to get help, even if eventually satisfied, are more likely to churn than those whose problem was resolved with minimal friction.

This calculator takes your total score, number of responses and count of low-effort responses, and returns your average CES along with the low-effort response rate.