Customer Effort Score (CES) Calculator

1. Take the answers to your effort question on a seven-point scale, from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree).
2. Type how many customers chose each answer. Empty fields count as zero.
3. Read the three results: the average CES out of 7, the share who agreed it was easy (5–7), and net easy (% agree minus % disagree), plus a bar showing easy, neutral and difficult shares.

The defaults are an example of 120 responses after support cases; use “Clear all fields” to start from zero. The maths runs in your browser: the calculator does not submit or save what you enter.

There is no single official CES formula. These three are the most common, and the calculator shows all of them:

The example uses 24 sevens, 36 sixes, 30 fives, 12 fours, 8 threes, 6 twos and 4 ones. The sum of scores is 7×24 + 6×36 + 5×30 + 4×12 + 3×8 + 2×6 + 1×4 = 622.

Pick one as your headline and keep it. The average is the most widely used; the percentage is easier to explain to frontline teams; net easy behaves like NPS and highlights the balance between easy and difficult experiences.

On the agreement scale, higher is better: 7 is the best possible average and 4 is the neutral midpoint. An average above 4 means more customers agreed than disagreed that the process was easy.

There is no meaningful universal benchmark for CES, because effort depends on the task: a password reset and an insurance claim will never score the same. Compare the same process over time, across channels (in store vs online) and between your own locations or teams.

Always look at the 1–3 answers separately. A stable average can hide a growing group of customers who struggled, and the open comments from that group usually name the exact step that needs fixing. More on question wording and when to use CES in our guide Customer Effort Score explained.

The calculator expects the seven-point CES 2.0 scale. If you use a five-point “very difficult” to “very easy” scale instead, the same logic applies, with 4–5 counting as easy and 1–2 as difficult, but results are not comparable with seven-point results. If your survey uses the original effort question, where a high number means more effort, reverse the direction before comparing it with anything else.

When combining results from several teams or months, add up the counts per answer and calculate once from the totals instead of averaging each group’s CES.

CES is most accurate when asked minutes after the task ends, which is hard to organise by hand. Qmeter sends the effort question by SMS or email when a case closes, shows it on tablets and kiosks at service desks, or embeds it after self-service steps on your website. Low scores can open a follow-up ticket automatically through ticketing with SLAs, and comments are grouped by theme so you can see which steps cost customers the most effort. Compare CES with CSAT and NPS in the NPS vs CSAT vs CES guide.