16 customer effort score survey questions to ask

The most successful businesses today take a customer-centric approach to their products and services. A key part of this approach is continuously gathering data to improve customer service and maintain a competitive advantage.

That’s where a customer effort score (CES) comes in. CES is a crucial measurement of how easy it is for customers to interact with your business. CES can measure the ease or difficulty of a number of customer interaction points — for example, how easy is it to make a purchase, resolve an issue, or get support?

Unlike traditional satisfaction surveys that focus on overall customer happiness, a CES survey specifically gauges the effort required from customers to achieve their desired outcomes. To gather accurate data that will actually help you improve your services, asking the right customer effort score survey questions is key.

The importance of determining your customer effort score

CES is an effective, accurate, and efficient way to rate the overall ease of use of your company’s products and services — an important measurement to track, as it directly correlates with customer loyalty and retention. Customers who find it easy to do business with a company are more likely to return, recommend the brand to others, and spend more over time.

CES makes it easier to identify and reduce friction points in the customer journey so businesses can improve overall satisfaction and foster strong, long-term consumer relationships. Unlike other metrics that may focus on customer satisfaction in general terms, CES provides specific insights into the ease of customer interactions, making it a powerful tool for driving operational improvements and enhancing customer experience.

Steps to calculate your customer effort score

CES questions typically use a Likert scale format. Companies are free to choose the exact range of the scale they want to use, but scales of 1–5 or 1–7 are common. Here’s an example. You could ask a customer “How easy was it to solve your problem on a scale of 1–7, with 1 indicating ‘very difficult’ and 7 indicating ‘very easy.’”

CES is often measured on a per-question basis, which is especially useful for identifying the specific aspects of the customer experience that are working or need improvement. The most common method to calculate CES is to find the average rating respondents gave. You’d measure the total sum of the numerical ratings respondents answer with and divide this by the total number of responses.

For example, say you ask a survey question about how easy it was to place an order on your website on a scale of 1–7, with 1 being very difficult and 7 being very easy. You get 150 responses to your question. To calculate CES, you first add up the numerical value of each respondent’s answer to find the sum. In this example, let’s say the sum is 550. The formula to calculate the CES in this instance is then 550 / 150 = 3.67.

On a scale of 1–7, a 3.67 is a pretty unsatisfactory customer effort score and indicates a need for improvement.

You can also calculate CES based on the percentage of respondents who responded with a positive or a negative rating answer.

The 16 best customer effort score survey questions

The right customer effort score survey questions will provide valuable and actionable insight about your customer experience. Actual channels and touchpoints for customer interactions vary widely from business to business and industry to industry, so it’s important to create questions that are actually applicable to your operation.

Regardless of your specific industry, these examples of customer effort score survey questions can help provide some inspiration. For each of these questions, you can use a rating scale of your choice, with the scale representing the degree of the aspect being measured (usually difficulty).

Website/app experience questions

• How easy or difficult was it to find the information you were looking for on our website or app?
• How easy or difficult was it to find the product you were looking for on our website or app?
• How easy or difficult was it to complete a purchase or task on our website?
• How easy or difficult was it to complete a specific task in our app?
• How would you rate your experience completing your recent purchase?

Customer support questions

• How easy was it to find and access support content when you needed it?
• How easy or difficult was it to contact live customer support?
• How easy or difficult was it to navigate our customer support FAQ page?
• How quickly were you able to get in touch with our customer support team?
• How available was our customer support team when you needed them?
• How easy or difficult was it to solve your problem with our customer support team?

Product/service experience questions

• How easy or difficult was it to understand the instructions for using our product?
• How comprehensive were the product instructions?
• How easy or difficult was the installation or setup process to start using this product?
• Did you experience any technical difficulties when using our product and, if so, how easy or difficult was it for you to resolve them?
• How easy or difficult has it been to use our product or service so far?

Jotform: A powerful tool to help you ask customer effort score survey questions

Maximizing the results of your customer effort score survey questions takes more than just asking for the right feedback — it requires the right platform for delivering the survey. With its easy drag-and-drop form-building functionality, Jotform makes it easy to create robust and professional-looking surveys in minutes. What’s more, the platform boasts a library of over 2,000 survey templates, including a CES survey template.

Whether you’re starting from scratch or from a template, the forms and surveys you create with Jotform are completely customizable. Users can choose questions from a variety of question types that include Likert scales, star ratings, multiple-choice, and more.

Jotform’s like and dislike and sliding scale widgets are especially helpful for customer effort score survey questions, allowing users to quickly measure the level of effort needed for a task. Additionally, all survey responses automatically populate a database with Jotform Tables, allowing easy data collection and analysis. You can also use Jotform’s Report Builder to automatically generate visual reports based on survey responses.

Jotform makes distributing surveys to participants quick and easy. Surveys can be filled out from any device, and shared through a variety of options, like emails, links, website embeds, QR codes, and social media posts. Jotform’s mobile app even allows users to save responses offline.

If you’re looking for an easy and effective way to ask customer effort score survey questions, look no further than Jotform. Choose from one of the 2,000-plus available survey templates or start from scratch, customize the survey to your liking, and embed it on your website to get started.

Photo by Edward Jenner