Customer Effort Score (CES)

What is Customer Effort Score (CES)?

Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how easy a guest found one specific task. Right after the task, you ask the guest how strongly they agree with a statement such as "The restaurant made it easy for me to place my order", and they answer on a scale, most often from 1 to 7.

For a restaurant, the tasks that matter are the ones guests do themselves: ordering in an app or kiosk, booking a table, redeeming a reward, or getting a wrong delivery order fixed. Each step that feels slow or confusing is a reason to order somewhere else next time.

CES is useful because it points at a process you can change. A low score after a support conversation tells you exactly where to look, which makes it a practical companion to broader metrics such as CSAT and NPS.

How to calculate CES

There are two common ways to report CES on the 1–7 agreement scale, and both come from the same answers:

• Average CES = sum of all answers ÷ number of answers
• Easy share = (answers of 5, 6 or 7 ÷ all answers) × 100

The average uses every answer, so it moves when guests shift from "agree" to "strongly agree". The easy share is simpler to explain to location teams, because it reads as the percentage of guests who found the task easy.

A CES example

Suppose a fast casual brand adds one question to its online order confirmation: "It was easy to place my order today." In one week, 250 guests answer.

The average is 1,436 ÷ 250 = 5.7, and 90 + 80 + 40 = 210 guests answered 5–7, so the easy share is 210 ÷ 250 × 100 = 84%. The 20 guests who answered 1–3 are the ones whose comments deserve a close read.

CES calculator

Enter how many guests gave each answer on a 1–7 agreement scale. You'll see your average CES, the share of guests who found the task easy and the margin of error on that share. The default values are only an example.

The margin of error shows how much the easy share could move by chance alone. With 250 responses it's about ±4.5 points, so a week-to-week change of two or three points at one location is usually noise.

CES question wording and scales

The wording of your CES question decides what the number means, so it pays to choose one version and keep it. These are the formats you're most likely to meet:

The agreement statement is the most widely used today. It keeps the direction consistent with CSAT, where a higher number is better, and it names the task, which makes the answer easier to act on.

A 7-point scale gives you more room to see small improvements, while a 5-point scale is quicker on a phone. Whichever you pick, scores on different scales can't be compared directly, so a change of scale needs a fresh baseline.

A follow-up question such as "What could we have made easier?" turns the number into something your team can fix. Momos's collection of restaurant survey questions has more wording ideas.

CES at restaurant touchpoints

CES fits any moment where the guest has to complete a task. The most useful touchpoints are the ones where friction costs you repeat orders, which you can identify with a guest journey map.

Delivery issues deserve particular attention. When an order arrives wrong through a third-party app, guests often don't know whether to contact the restaurant or the platform, and every extra contact adds effort to an already poor experience.

A post-order survey is the simplest way to reach guests minutes after they order. For support conversations, asking when the case is closed captures the whole resolution, including any follow-up.

CES vs. CSAT vs. NPS

CES is one of three metrics most restaurant brands use, and each answers a different question. The full detail on the other two lives in their own entries on CSAT and NPS.

In practice, CES is the most diagnostic of the three for processes. A guest can love the food and still struggle with your app, and only an effort question catches that cleanly.

NPS suits relationship-level tracking, while CES belongs at specific steps. Many brands ask a CES question after support conversations and app orders, CSAT after visits, and NPS on a slower cadence.

CES and customer loyalty research

The case for CES rests on the CEB research behind it. In "Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers", the authors reported that their effort measure predicted loyalty better than satisfaction or NPS in the service interactions they studied.

In The Effortless Experience (2013), the authors report that 96% of customers with high-effort service interactions became more disloyal, compared with 9% of those whose interactions took little effort. Their research defined disloyalty as behaviors such as buying less, switching and negative word of mouth.

That research was about customer service and self-service channels across many industries. Applying it to restaurant ordering and booking is a reasonable extension, though it hasn't been tested in the same way, so your own data is the best guide to how strongly effort drives repeat visits for your brand.

How to interpret your CES

On a 1–7 agreement scale, 4 is the neutral midpoint, so an average above 4 leans toward easy and below 4 toward hard. There is no widely accepted public CES benchmark for restaurants, because brands ask different questions on different scales.

Your most useful comparisons are internal:

• Trend over time. A steady average shows a stable process; a drop after an app update or a menu change points to the cause.
• Channel against channel. Comparing app, website, kiosk and phone orders shows where the friction sits.
• Location against location. For support and pickup tasks, differences between locations often reflect staffing and local processes.
• The hard answers. The share of guests answering 1–3, and their comments, usually tell you more than a small change in the average.

An operator report that shows each location's scores next to its response count makes it easier to tell a real shift from chance.

Limitations of CES

• It measures one task. CES says little about food quality, atmosphere or value, so it works best alongside broader measures.
• Versions aren't comparable. The original effort question and the agreement statement run in opposite directions, and 5- and 7-point results can't be mixed.
• Wording shapes answers. "Effort" and "easy" are interpreted differently by different guests and in different languages.
• The evidence comes from service. The CEB findings concern support interactions, so the link between effort and loyalty in dining is an assumption you can test with your own data.
• Small samples are noisy. A single location's weekly CES may rest on a few dozen answers.
• Silent guests are missing. Guests who abandon a checkout never reach the survey, so CES pairs well with abandonment and contact-rate data.

How to improve your CES

Remove steps from ordering. Saved payment details, reorder buttons and fewer screens at checkout reduce the work guests do on every order, which shows up directly in app and web CES.

Resolve problems on the first contact. The CEB research singled out repeat contacts, transfers and having to repeat information as major sources of effort. Giving managers authority to refund or remake an order on the spot removes most of them.

Make help easy to find. A clear way to report a problem in the app, on the receipt and on your website stops guests from hunting for the right channel. A shared inbox keeps the conversation in one place.

Fix delivery handoffs. Agreeing with each delivery platform who handles which problem, and saying so in your replies, saves guests from being bounced between the restaurant and the app.

Close the loop on hard answers. Following up with guests who answered 1–3, as part of service recovery, repairs the relationship and shows you the exact step that went wrong.

Best CES tools for restaurants

A good CES tool lets you trigger a short survey at the right moment, such as an order confirmation or a closed support case, and breaks results down by location and channel. For multi-location brands, linking low scores to the conversation behind them matters as much as the score itself.

These tools differ in how they collect surveys, connect them to reviews and messages, and report across locations. Momos's roundup of the best restaurant survey software helps you compare them against your own channels.

Common CES mistakes

• Mixing question versions. Changing from the effort question to the agreement statement reverses the direction of your scores.
• Asking too late. Guests forget the steps of a task within days, so delayed surveys measure memory more than effort.
• Asking about the whole visit. CES is designed for a task, and a vague question produces a vague answer.
• Reporting the average alone. The share of hard answers often reveals a problem that a steady average hides.
• Skipping the comment box. Without a follow-up question, you know a task was hard but can't see why.
• Leaving low scores unanswered. A guest who struggled and hears nothing back has one more reason to order elsewhere.

History of CES

CES grew out of customer service research at CEB, the Corporate Executive Board, a membership advisory firm based in Arlington, Virginia. Its customer contact practice studied what made customers more or less loyal after a service interaction.

In the July–August 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review, Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman and Nicholas Toman published "Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers". HBR describes the underlying study as covering more than 75,000 people who dealt with contact center representatives or self-service channels.

The article argued that going above and beyond made little difference to loyalty, while reducing the effort customers had to make mattered a great deal. It introduced the Customer Effort Score as a way to measure that effort.

The original question asked how much effort the customer personally had to put forth to handle their request, on a 1–5 scale where a low score was good. Practitioners found the reversed direction confusing, and the word "effort" was understood differently across languages and cultures.

In 2013, Dixon, Toman and Rick DeLisi expanded the research into the book The Effortless Experience (Portfolio). A revised question, often called CES 2.0, became the standard: guests rate their agreement with "The company made it easy for me to handle my issue" on a 1–7 scale.

Gartner acquired CEB in April 2017 and continues its customer service research. Over time, CES spread well beyond contact centers to digital checkouts, onboarding and, in restaurants, ordering, booking and delivery support.