Customer effort score: how to measure customer effort in B2B

What customer effort score is and how to calculate it

Customer effort score (CES) is a metric that measures how much effort a customer had to put in to get their issue resolved with your company. Customer effort score focuses on one dimension: whether getting the issue resolved was easy. It does not measure overall satisfaction or willingness to recommend the company. In many market studies, including the CEB (now Gartner) work on Customer Effort, CES turns out to be one of the few metrics that correlates with customer behavior in the following months, not just with what customers declare in a survey.

In B2B this metric has extra meaning, because there is rarely just one person on the other side. The buying decision passes through procurement, the technical team, sometimes the board. Each of these people runs into a different kind of problem: missing documents, unclear terms, slow responses, a complicated claims process. Customer effort score pulls this into a single number that can be compared across quarters and across teams.

Formula and how to calculate it

The most common version of CES is based on a single question, usually asked after a ticket is closed, a delivery is made, or an implementation is completed:

"[Company name] made it easy for me to resolve my issue." Scale 1-7, where 1 means "strongly disagree" and 7 means "strongly agree".

The formula for this variant (top-3-box on a 1-7 scale) is simple:

CES = (number of responses 5, 6, and 7 / total number of responses) × 100

This is one variant; other companies use the arithmetic mean or top-2-box on a 1-5 scale. The result is given as a percentage. If out of 80 surveys 52 people selected 5, 6, or 7, CES is 65%. In the top-2-box variant on a 1-5 scale, ratings of 4 and 5 count as positive, and the formula looks like this: CES = (number of responses 4 and 5 / total number of responses) × 100. Example: out of 50 surveys 30 people chose 4 or 5, so CES is 60%. It is important to stick to one method and one scale across the whole organization, because otherwise comparisons between teams lose their meaning.

The second variant is the arithmetic mean of all responses. It is simpler, but less resistant to extreme ratings. Example: five responses of 7, 6, 5, 3, and 1 give a mean of 4.4 on a 1-7 scale, which converts to roughly 63%. In practice the percentage version works better, because it is easier to show to the board alongside other metrics.

It is worth pairing CES with a marketing audit, which shows where in the funnel the customer runs into the most problems before they even contact the service department. The metric alone says there is a problem. The audit says where it is.

What actually affects the CES result

Several factors affect the customer effort score result, and in B2B companies they repeat with surprising regularity. It is worth knowing them, because without that knowledge improving the metric comes down to guesswork.

Number of contacts needed to resolve the issue

This is the strongest single factor. Imagine Anna from the procurement department, who orders 200 parts. The invoice arrives with an error. Anna calls once, the consultant promises to fix it. She calls a second time, nobody knows about the issue. The third time she finally reaches the right person. Three calls, two days, zero feedback. Her CES: 1. Effort grows regardless of how nice the service was. Research on omnichannel retailing shows that a customer expects a seamless experience and instant recognition in every channel, regardless of which one they use (Piotr Ciesielski, "Exploring Omnichannel Retailing", Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 2019, ISBN 978-83-01-20845-1). In B2B this works exactly the same way: if the salesperson cannot see the history of the service ticket, the customer has to tell the whole story again.

Availability of information before contact

A customer who finds the answer on the website does not generate a ticket. A customer who does not find it calls, writes, and wastes time. Every missing document, price list, technical specification, or FAQ is a pain point that raises CES. In B2B this applies especially to the documents the procurement department needs: terms of cooperation, certificates, forms.

Consistency across channels

The same issue reported by email, by phone, and through a form should land in one place and have one history. If it does not, the customer repeats information, and their effort grows. This is one of the most common reasons for high CES in companies that have implemented several tools but have not connected them into one process.

Predictability of the process

The customer wants to know what will happen and when. No response deadline, unclear order status, no ticket confirmation; all of this increases mental load. In B2B, where orders are often multi-stage, uncertainty about the next step alone can lower CES more than the actual waiting time.

What counts as a good CES score in B2B

There is no single universal customer effort score benchmark that fits every industry. Results vary between sectors and depend on how complex the product is and how often the customer contacts the company. A manufacturer of industrial machinery that spends six months implementing a production line will see different results than a SaaS provider billed monthly.

Instead of looking for one number, it helps to adopt three interpretation principles. The thresholds below are the author's working proposal, not an industry standard:

• Above 70%, the process is seen as easy in most cases. You can work on the details.
• 50-70%, there is a clear area for improvement. The problem usually lies in one or two steps of the process.
• Below 50%, the customer regularly runs into problems. This is a signal that the process needs to be redesigned, not that communication needs polishing.

Treat these thresholds as a starting point, not as an industry standard. The real benchmark is your own score from a quarter ago and the comparison between teams within the company. If one team has a CES of 75% and another 45% with a similar number of tickets, the gap says more than any external report.

It is also worth looking at the distribution of responses, not just the average. If 40% of customers give a 7 and 30% give a 1, the average looks decent, but a third of customers are genuinely frustrated. That kind of distribution signals that the process works well for only one type of case.

How to reduce customer effort in practice

Improving CES does not require a major transformation project. In most B2B companies, a few actions that can be implemented within a single quarter are enough. Below are specific steps that in practice make the biggest difference.

1. Count the touchpoints per case

Take the last 50 tickets and count how many touchpoints (email, phone, form) were needed to close them. If the average is more than two, you have a problem to solve. This simple measurement shows where you are losing the most time for both the customer and the team at the same time.

2. Remove repetitive questions from the contact path

Collect the 20 most common questions that reach support. For each one, prepare an answer where the customer looks for it: on the product page, in the customer portal, in the documentation. This lowers CES faster than training the team, because it removes the need for contact altogether.

3. Connect the customer history in a single view

Sales, service, and accounting should all see the same information about the customer. If the systems are not integrated, at least introduce a shared customer identifier and a note that passes between departments. The customer should not have to repeat the same thing three times.

4. Set a response standard and communicate it

Give the customer a deadline for when they will get an answer, and stick to it. Even if the answer is "we need two days", it is better than silence. Predictability reduces mental load more than speed.

5. Measure CES after specific events, not once a year

A survey after every ticket closure gives data that can be attributed to a specific process. An annual satisfaction survey says "it is OK", but it does not say where to improve. More frequent measurement on a smaller sample is more useful than a large survey once every twelve months.

If you want to combine CES improvement with a broader marketing and sales action plan, it is worth looking at B2B marketing strategy, which organizes priorities and shows which pain points have the greatest impact on revenue.

Takeaways for B2B teams

Customer effort score is a metric that is easy to calculate and hard to ignore. It shows not whether the customer is satisfied, but whether the company forces them to do unnecessary work. In B2B, where several people make decisions and processes can be long, this dimension of effort often determines whether the customer returns.

Start with one measurement, one process, and one improvement. CES does not require large budgets, it requires consistency in removing problems. And if you want to check where in your company the customer loses the most time, marketing audit will show it in the data, not in a hunch.