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Customer Effort Score Calculator

Enter the total score, number of responses and low-effort responses to get your CES.

How it is calculated

The tool computes an average and two shares from three survey totals: CES = sum of all scores ÷ number of responses, low-effort share = easy responses ÷ responses × 100 and high-effort share = (responses − easy responses) ÷ responses × 100. The sum is every rating given, added up across respondents. Easy responses is the count you treat as low effort, for example everyone who chose the top two points. CES shows two decimals; the shares are percentages. The high-effort share is simply everything not counted as easy, so neutral answers fall into it. Responses and easy responses must be whole numbers, responses must be above zero, the sum cannot be negative, and easy responses cannot exceed responses; otherwise there is no result. The tool does not know your scale, so a sum that is impossible for your scale (say 9,000 over 320 answers on a 1 to 7 scale) still produces a number.

Worked example

A support team collects 320 survey answers on a 1 to 7 scale. The scores add up to 1,520, and 205 customers chose one of the top two options. Average effort: 1,520 ÷ 320 = 4.75. Low-effort share: 205 ÷ 320 = 0.6406, shown as 64.06%. The remaining 320 − 205 = 115 responses make the high-effort share 35.94%. So the average looks middling, while roughly two in three customers found the process easy.

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Common mistakes

  • Entering the average score in the sum field. The field needs the total of all ratings, so an average of 4.75 over 320 answers is entered as 1520.
  • Counting easy responses on one scale but the sum on another. A 1 to 5 sum cannot be combined with a 1 to 7 definition of easy.
  • Including skipped or blank surveys in the response count, which drags the average down.
  • Reading the high-effort share as only the bad answers. It includes neutral ones, so it is larger than the share who actually found the process hard.
  • Comparing a CES from a 1 to 7 scale with one from a 1 to 5 scale. The same number means something different on each.

Sources

About this calculator

Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how easy or hard it was for a customer to get their issue resolved, usually collected with a post-interaction survey asking respondents to rate effort on a 1-7 scale (“How easy was it to resolve your issue?”). The overall CES is the average of all responses, but customer experience teams also track the share of “low-effort” responses (typically the top two scores) separately, since a high average can hide a meaningful chunk of frustrated customers.

Support teams and CX researchers favor CES over satisfaction scores because research (originally from Gartner/CEB) found effort is a stronger predictor of customer loyalty than satisfaction — customers who have to work hard to get help, even if eventually satisfied, are more likely to churn than those whose problem was resolved with minimal friction.

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