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Customer Effort Score Calculator

Work out your customer effort score (CES) as an average of 1 to 7 responses or as the percent of favorable answers. Free, no sign-up.

How do you score CES?
Customer effort score
5.53 / 7
Average of 100 responses. Higher means easier.
Low effort
1: 2%2: 3%3: 5%4: 10%5: 20%6: 30%7: 30%
Percent favorable (5 to 7)
80%
Found it hard (1 to 3)
10%
Responses
100

Free. No sign-up. Everything is calculated in your browser, nothing you enter is sent anywhere.

How it's calculated

CES as an average
CES = sum of (rating x count) / total responses, on a 1 to 7 scale
CES as percent favorable
CES % = responses rated 5, 6 or 7 / total responses x 100
Example: 553 total points from 100 responses gives an average CES of 5.53. If 80 of those 100 responses were a 5, 6 or 7, the percent favorable CES is 80%.
Worked examples

Customer effort score calculation examples

Four survey results worked through with both methods.

Average score

100 responses to "The company made it easy for me to handle my issue", 1 to 7.

Ratings 1 to 7: 2, 3, 5, 10, 20, 30, 30.

The weighted total is 553, so CES = 553 / 100 = 5.53 out of 7. That is low effort.

Percent favorable

Your survey tool reports how many people answered 5, 6 or 7.

80 favorable responses out of 100.

80 / 100 x 100 = a CES of 80% favorable.

Same average, different spread

Two teams that both average 5.0.

Team A: everyone answers 5. Team B: half answer 7 and half answer 3.

Both average 5.0, but Team A is 100% favorable and Team B is 50% favorable. Look at the spread as well as the mean.

Small sample

A first run of the survey after a help center redesign.

12 responses, 9 of them 5 or higher.

9 / 12 = 75% favorable. With only 12 answers, one customer moves the score by about 8 points, so wait for more data before drawing conclusions.

Benchmarks

How to read your customer effort score

General rules of thumb. Survey wording, timing and channel all shift what a typical score looks like.

01

Pick one method and keep it

The average and the percent favorable are both common ways to report CES, and they give different numbers. Choose one, write it down, and compare only against your own earlier results.

02

On a 7-point scale, 5.5 or higher is a good sign

As a rough rule of thumb, an average above 5.5 suggests customers rarely struggle and below 4.5 points to friction worth fixing. Treat these as guides, not industry standards.

03

Ask right after the interaction

CES works best as a transactional survey sent straight after a support conversation or a task like checkout or a return. Waiting days blurs what the customer is scoring.

04

Read the low scores first

A 1, 2 or 3 almost always comes with a reason. Add one optional comment box and group the comments by theme, such as slow replies, repeating yourself or unclear policies.

FAQ

Questions people ask

What is customer effort score?
Customer effort score (CES) measures how easy it was for a customer to get something done, such as resolving a support issue or completing a purchase. Customers rate a statement like "The company made it easy for me to handle my issue" on a scale, usually 1 to 7.
How do you calculate customer effort score?
The most common method is the average: add up all the scores and divide by the number of responses. The second method is percent favorable: divide the number of responses of 5, 6 or 7 on a 7-point scale by the total responses and multiply by 100. This calculator supports both.
What is a good customer effort score?
On a 1 to 7 scale where 7 is very easy, an average of 5.5 or higher is generally considered good, and around 75% favorable or more is a common target. These are rules of thumb, so the most useful comparison is your own score over time.
Is a higher or lower CES better?
It depends on your scale. When 7 means very easy, as in this calculator, higher is better. Some surveys flip the wording to "strongly agree that it was difficult", where lower is better, so check your scale direction before you compare numbers.
What is the difference between CES, CSAT and NPS?
CES measures how easy an interaction was, CSAT measures how satisfied the customer was with it, and NPS measures how likely they are to recommend you overall. Many support teams track CES and CSAT per interaction and NPS across the whole relationship.
Is anything I enter stored?
No. The calculator runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to a server or saved.
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