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Frameworks, core principles and top case studies for SaaS pricing, learnt and refined over 28+ years of SaaS-monetization experience.
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In today's competitive SaaS landscape, customer experience has emerged as a critical differentiator. While metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) have long been staples in measuring customer sentiment, many executives are now turning to Customer Effort Score (CES) to gain deeper insights into their user experience. This powerful metric helps quantify how easy it is for customers to interact with your product or service—a factor increasingly linked to retention and loyalty.
What is Customer Effort Score (CES)?
Customer Effort Score measures the ease with which customers can accomplish tasks when interacting with your company's products, services, or support channels. Introduced by the Corporate Executive Board (now Gartner) in 2010, the metric was born from research showing that reducing customer effort is more predictive of loyalty than delight.
At its core, CES asks customers a simple question: "How easy was it to [complete a specific action]?" The response is typically measured on a scale (often 1-7, with 7 being "very easy"), allowing companies to quantify friction points in the customer journey.
Why CES Matters for SaaS Companies
1. Stronger Predictor of Loyalty Than Satisfaction
According to Gartner's research, 96% of customers with a high-effort experience reported being disloyal, compared to only 9% of those who had a low-effort experience. This makes CES a remarkably reliable indicator of future customer behavior.
2. Direct Link to Revenue Retention
For SaaS businesses, where recurring revenue is the lifeblood of success, CES offers particular value. Research from Sirius Decisions shows that B2B companies that successfully reduce customer effort see a 94% higher likelihood of repurchase and an 88% increase in spend.
3. Identifies Specific Improvement Opportunities
Unlike broader metrics, CES pinpoints exactly where friction occurs in customer interactions. This specificity enables targeted improvements rather than general customer experience initiatives.
4. Supports Product-Led Growth
In modern SaaS organizations embracing product-led growth, reducing friction is paramount. CES helps identify where customers struggle when using your product independently, allowing you to remove barriers to activation and expansion.
How to Measure Customer Effort Score
Implementing CES effectively requires a strategic approach to both data collection and analysis:
Step 1: Define Key Touchpoints
Begin by mapping your customer journey and identifying critical interactions where measuring effort makes sense:
- Onboarding process
- Feature adoption
- Customer support interactions
- Renewal processes
- Upgrade experiences
Step 2: Craft Your CES Question
The phrasing of your CES question matters. The most common formats include:
- Classic CES: "How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?" (1 = very low effort, 7 = very high effort)
- CES 2.0: "The company made it easy for me to handle my issue." (1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree)
- Custom CES: "[Company name] made it easy to [specific action]." (1-7 scale)
Many SaaS companies find the agreement-based format (CES 2.0) more intuitive for customers.
Step 3: Select Your Scale
While the 7-point scale is standard, some variations exist:
- 5-point scale: Simpler but less granular
- 7-point scale: Better differentiates degrees of effort
- Binary Yes/No: Maximizes response rates but loses nuance
Step 4: Determine Timing and Delivery
CES works best when measured immediately after a specific interaction:
- Post-support: Send within 24 hours of ticket resolution
- In-app: Present after completion of key workflows
- Onboarding milestones: Measure after significant setup steps
Step 5: Calculate Your CES
The basic calculation is straightforward:
CES = Sum of all customer effort scores ÷ Number of responses
For the agreement-based scale (CES 2.0), higher scores are better. For the effort-based scale (classic CES), lower scores are better.
Many SaaS organizations also track the percentage of customers giving top-box scores (6-7 on the "easy" end of the scale) as their primary CES metric.
Implementing CES Within Your Organization
Integration With Other Metrics
CES works best as part of a holistic measurement framework. Consider pairing it with:
- NPS: Measures overall loyalty and relationship strength
- CSAT: Captures immediate satisfaction with specific interactions
- Product usage data: Provides behavioral context for effort scores
According to McKinsey, companies that successfully integrate multiple customer metrics see 3x greater correlation with revenue growth than those focused on a single metric.
Acting on CES Insights
Collecting CES data is only valuable when it drives action:
- Segment analysis: Break down scores by customer segment, product area, and journey stage
- Root cause identification: Use follow-up questions to understand why certain interactions require high effort
- Cross-functional ownership: Assign accountability for improvement to specific teams
- Closed-loop follow-up: Reach out to customers reporting high effort to resolve their specific issues
Real-World CES Impact
Slack, the workplace communication platform, attributes part of its explosive growth to obsessive focus on reducing customer effort. By regularly measuring CES across key workflows, they identified that users struggled with channel organization. This insight led to the development of their channel folders feature, which reduced effort scores for organization tasks by 21% and correlated with higher retention rates.
Similarly, Atlassian used CES to transform their customer support approach. After discovering that multiple interactions drove significantly higher effort scores, they redesigned their support model to emphasize first-contact resolution. This change improved their CES by 17% and reduced support costs by 12% through fewer repeat contacts.
Common CES Implementation Challenges
Survey Fatigue
With businesses increasingly soliciting feedback, survey fatigue is a legitimate concern. To combat this:
- Limit CES surveys to truly significant interactions
- Use sampling techniques rather than surveying every customer
- Keep surveys extremely brief (ideally a single question with optional comments)
Incentive Alignment
Ensure that improving CES becomes a shared organizational goal:
- Include CES targets in executive dashboards
- Tie some portion of variable compensation to CES improvements
- Recognize and reward teams that successfully reduce customer effort
Conclusion
Customer Effort Score provides SaaS executives with a powerful tool to identify and eliminate friction in the customer experience. By measuring and systematically reducing effort, companies can drive meaningful improvements in retention, expansion, and ultimately, sustainable revenue growth.
As competition intensifies and customers increasingly expect frictionless experiences, those organizations that master CES implementation gain a significant competitive advantage—not just in measuring customer sentiment, but in building products and services that truly reduce customer effort at every touchpoint.
To begin implementing CES in your organization, start with a single high-impact customer journey point, establish your baseline measurement, and commit to a process for translating those insights into tangible improvements. Your customers—and your bottom line—will thank you.