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Stand: May 2026·6 Min. Lesezeit

Customer Effort Score (CES) — measuring effort instead of delight

CES flips the perspective: not "how delighted was the customer?" but "how easy did we make it for them?" Evidence from the Harvard Business Review shows this predicts loyalty better than any delight indicator. This page explains its origin, measurement, and analysis.

In their 2010 Harvard Business Review article "Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers", Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman, and Nicholas Toman revealed a counterintuitive finding: customers punish a company for poor service far more than they reward it for exceptionally good service. Trying to exceed expectations costs disproportionately much and yields comparatively little. What matters more is making the path to resolving the customer's issue as easy as possible.

Out of this came the Customer Effort Score (CES) — a measure of the perceived ease of resolving a problem.

How CES is measured

In the original HBR article, CES was captured with a direct effort question: "How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?" Response scale from 1 (very little) to 5 (very much). This variant yields individual-case impressions but is poorly suited to aggregate analysis — managers had to deal with each record individually.

The market research firm Gartner therefore reformulated it into the variant common today, phrased as an agreement question:

"Please indicate the extent to which you agree with the following statement:
The company made it easy for me to handle my issue."

The response uses a seven-point scale:

  1. Strongly disagree
  2. Disagree
  3. Somewhat disagree
  4. Neither agree nor disagree
  5. Somewhat agree
  6. Agree
  7. Strongly agree

The CES value is the percentage of respondents who answered with at least 5 ("somewhat agree" and above) — the top-three box.

\text{CES} = \frac{\text{Number of respondents with answer} \geq 5}{\text{Number of all respondents}} \times 100\,\%

The value ranges between 0% and 100%; higher = more easily perceived problem resolution.

What the numbers say

The HBR authors' CES study quantified the effect of low effort very concretely:

  • 94% of customers with low resolution effort said they intended to buy from the company again.
  • 88% said they intended to increase their spending on the company's products and services.
  • 81% of customers who had difficulty getting their issue handled, by contrast, planned to spread negative word of mouth.

The finding suggests that investments in reducing friction (self-service paths, a clear FAQ architecture, short hotline wait times, consistent information across channels) pay off more for loyalty than investments in delight initiatives.

When to use CES

CES is especially well suited after service interactions of a problem-solving nature — hotline calls, support tickets, complaint handling, self-service sessions. For pure purchase touchpoints (first purchase, checkout), CSAT is usually more appropriate. For assessing the long-term relationship, NPS is a useful complement.

For an overview of using NPS, CSAT, and CES together, see the page NPS, CSAT, and CES in QUESTIONSTAR.

Sources

  • Dixon, Matthew, Karen Freeman, and Nicholas Toman: Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers. Harvard Business Review, July–August 2010.
  • Gartner: Unveiling the New and Improved Customer Effort Score. gartner.com.

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