What is the Customer Effort Score (CES), and how is it calculated?
The Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how much effort someone had to put in to solve a problem or complete an action, rather than their overall satisfaction or loyalty. Matthew Dixon proposed it in the Harvard Business Review article "Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers" (2010), with a core finding: reducing effort predicts future loyalty better than trying to surprise or delight someone.
The question and the scale
The typical question is "How easy was it to resolve your issue today?", answered on an effort scale (for example, 1 = very difficult to 7 = very easy). Unlike NPS, which always uses 0 to 10, CES has no fixed standard scale length: 5 and 7 points are the most common, depending on how much granularity is needed.
The formula
CES is calculated as the simple average of all numeric responses, without sorting them into categories the way NPS does. With 50 responses on a 1-to-7 scale, adding up all the values and dividing by 50 gives the average CES. A common variant is to also report the "top-box": the percentage of people who picked one of the two highest options on the scale (low effort), useful when the average alone doesn't communicate what proportion had a bad experience.
How to set up a CES question in SurvIQ
SurvIQ doesn't have a separate "CES" question type, because it doesn't need one: it's a "Rating" question with a 7-point scale, the same type used for Likert scales or other simple numeric measurements. When adding the question, you pick the scale length from the editor and write the question text around effort instead of general satisfaction.
What the result looks like
In results, SurvIQ automatically calculates the average of all responses and shows the full distribution: how many people picked each point on the scale. That distribution is enough to calculate the top-box by hand if needed, without exporting raw data to another tool.
When to use CES instead of NPS or CSAT
CES works best right after a specific interaction with measurable effort: closing a support ticket, completing an onboarding flow, or finishing a purchase. NPS measures long-term loyalty with the whole brand, and CSAT measures overall satisfaction with a specific interaction; neither one directly captures "how hard was it", which is exactly what predicts whether someone will contact support again for the same reason.
CES's limitation
A high effort score tells you something went wrong, but not which step of the process caused it. Just like with NPS, it helps to add an open-ended follow-up question ("What made it difficult?") right after, so you can act on the specific cause instead of being left with just the number.