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Customer effort score (CES) 0:53
A 53-second explainer of Customer effort score (CES), narrated over the same demo you can try yourself.
Try the interactive Customer effort score (CES) demo
What this video covers
Customer effort score (CES) asks one thing after an interaction: how easy was it to get what you needed? Usually a single agree-scale statement ("the company made it easy to handle my issue"), it shifts the question from "are you delighted?" to "did we get out of your way?" - on the theory that reducing effort keeps people more reliably than trying to wow them.
Rate the effort and the score reframes the whole question: not "did you love it?" but "did we make you work for it?". High effort is the quiet churn driver - the extra step, the repeated explanation, the hunt for the button - so a low-effort score is often a better early-warning signal than a happy face.
