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Glossary
Customer feedback

What is Customer Effort Score (CES)?

Customer Effort Score (CES) is a customer satisfaction metric that measures the ease with which customers can perform a specific task or resolve an issue. It is typically calculated by asking users to rate their agreement with a statement like 'The company made it easy for me to handle my issue' on a scale from 1 to 7.

When to use it

Teams should use CES immediately after transactional touchpoints, such as completing an onboarding flow, resolving a support ticket, or using a new feature for the first time. It is designed to identify friction points in the user journey that could lead to churn. By tracking this score, product managers can prioritize UX improvements that directly reduce the cognitive load on the customer.

Example

A SaaS team recently launched a new data import tool and wants to measure its usability. They send a CES survey to 200 users who completed an import in the last 48 hours, asking them to rate the ease of the process on a 7-point scale. The results show an average score of 3.8, significantly lower than their target of 6.0, indicating that users are struggling with the interface. Based on this data, the team prioritizes a UI refactor in the next sprint to simplify the mapping step and improve the overall effort score.

How Planet Roadmap helps with Customer Effort Score (CES)

Planet Roadmap features a public feedback portal where users can easily submit and vote on requests, reducing the effort required for customers to share their needs. The platform also allows teams to link these feedback items directly to Kanban boards to ensure high-effort friction points are addressed in the product cycle.

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FAQ

How is CES different from NPS?
While NPS (Net Promoter Score) measures long-term brand loyalty and the likelihood of recommendation, CES focuses on the immediate ease of a specific interaction. NPS provides a high-level view of customer sentiment, whereas CES is a tactical metric used to identify and fix specific usability hurdles.
What is considered a 'good' Customer Effort Score?
On a 7-point scale, a 'good' score is typically anything above 5.0, indicating that users find your processes easy to navigate. However, the most important application is tracking the trend over time; a declining score for a specific feature suggests that recent updates have introduced unnecessary complexity.

Related terms

Net Promoter Score (NPS)CSATVoice of CustomerTime to ValueChurnRetentionFeature RequestFeedback Portal

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