CES — Customer effort
What is customer effort?
CES measures how much effort it took the customer to get their problem solved. It is asked with a statement along the lines of "the company made it easy for me" and an agreement scale, and it starts from a specific idea: making things easy for customers keeps them better than trying to wow them.
Why it matters
What it means for a SaaS
It is the metric that best predicts whether somebody will buy again, and the one that best catches a problem the other two hide. A customer can rate the answer well, because it was correct and friendly, and still have had to write four times, dig out a fact themselves and wait two days. CSAT does not see that; CES does.
Customer effort in detail
How it is asked
With a single sentence and a scale, right after closing. The wording matters: asking in the positive ("they made it easy for me") gives more stable results than asking about difficulty.
Where the effort comes from
From having to repeat the problem to more than one person, from hunting for where to get in touch, from waiting without knowing how long, and from being sent an article that does not answer your case. All four shrink if whoever picks up the conversation already knows what the customer said before.
Why it is used less than the others
Because it is less well known and because the number lacks the appeal of a percentage. On teams that do use it, it tends to be the one that drives the most concrete changes, precisely because it points at processes rather than people.
How Intake handles it
Frequently asked questions
CES or CSAT?
They measure different things and complement each other. CSAT says whether the answer landed well; CES, whether getting it was costly. When CSAT is high and retention does not follow, CES usually explains why.
When is CES asked?
Immediately after closing the conversation, same as CSAT, and about the same interaction. Asking later measures the memory of the effort, which distorts fast.
Related terms
These usually come up in the same conversation.
CSAT — Customer satisfaction
CSAT is the metric that measures how satisfied a customer was with one specific interaction. It is asked right after resolving, usually on a one-to-five scale or with a thumbs up or down, and expressed as the percentage of positive answers over the total.
NPS — Net Promoter Score
NPS measures how willing a customer is to recommend a company. It is asked on a zero-to-ten scale and calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors (zero to six) from the percentage of promoters (nine and ten). The result runs from −100 to 100, and the sevens and eights do not count.
Self-service
Self-service is everything that lets a customer meet their need without talking to anybody: searching the documentation, checking the state of something in their dashboard, changing a setting or downloading an invoice. It is the cheapest form of support and, when it works, the one customers prefer.
Escalation
Escalation is handing a conversation to somebody with more knowledge or more permissions to resolve it. It can go from one support tier to another, from an automated agent to a person, or from support to engineering, and in every case whoever receives it has not seen the case until that moment.
Deflection rate
Deflection rate is the percentage of questions resolved without a person getting involved, either because the customer found the answer themselves or because an automated agent closed it. It is the metric used to justify any investment in self-service or in AI.
Resolution time
Resolution time is how long passes between a question arriving and it being resolved and closed. Unlike first response time, it measures the whole process, including waits on the customer and the time spent with other teams.
