Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how much effort a customer had to put in to gettheir issue resolved, usually collected through a single question like "How easy was itto handle your request today?" on a numeric scale.
CES was built on research showing that reducing customer effort predictsloyalty better than trying to delight customers. A customer who gets a quick, low-effortresolution is more likely to stick around than one who had a delightful but drawn-outexperience. High effort, being passed between agents, repeating information, waiting onhold, is one of the strongest predictors of churn in the data behind this metric.
CES is typically collected right after an interaction, on a 1-5 or1-7 scale, and reported as an average score. Some teams break it down by contact reasonto find where effort spikes, a return process that requires three separate contacts tocomplete, for example, shows up clearly in CES even if CSAT for each individualinteraction looks fine.