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CES calculator
Enter how many people picked each rating from 1 to 7 and get your Customer Effort Score, the share who found the flow easy, and where the friction sits.
Your survey responses
Enter how many people picked each rating, where 7 means very easy.
0 responses
Ship beautiful CES surveys with Flows
Create effort surveys that live inside your own flows, without the engineering overhead.
Your Customer Effort Score
Waiting for responses
CES is the average of every answer on the 1 to 7 scale, so it always lands between 1, where the flow felt impossible, and 7, where it felt effortless.
Your groups
High effort
1 to 3
0.0%
0 responses
People had to work to get through this flow. Their follow up answers name the step to fix.
Neutral
4
0.0%
0 responses
Neither easy nor hard. Usually a flow that works but takes more steps than it needs.
Low effort
5 to 7
0.0%
0 responses
The flow got out of the way. This is the share you want to grow over time.
Rating distribution
How your responses spread across the 1 to 7 scale.
How CES is calculated
Customer Effort Score measures how hard something was to do. People rate a flow they just finished on a 1 to 7 scale, and the score is the plain average of every answer. Higher means easier.
STEP 1
Ask at the end of a flow
Setup, integration, billing changes, data import, permissions. Ask on the last step, while the effort is still fresh.
STEP 2
Keep the polarity fixed
Decide that 7 always means very easy, label both ends of the scale, and never flip it. Comparisons across surveys are worthless the moment the direction changes.
STEP 3
Average every answer
Add up all the ratings and divide by the number of responses. Unlike NPS and CSAT, no answer is thrown away, so a 4 pulls the score just as honestly as a 1.
The formula
CES = sum of all ratings ÷ number of responses
The share of people who rated the flow 5 or higher is worth reading next to the average, because one badly stuck group can hide behind a comfortable mean.
CES has the best track record of the four standard surveys at predicting whether someone keeps using a product, because people forget what delighted them and remember what was hard. See how to create in-app surveys for how it compares with NPS, CSAT, and PMF.
What is a good CES score?
On a 1 to 7 scale, most flows land between 5 and 6. What matters more than the absolute number is the same flow measured before and after you changed it, and the comments attached to the low scores.
High friction
From 1 to 4
More people struggled than glided through. Fix the flow before you measure it again.
Mixed
From 4 to 5
The flow works, but enough people hit resistance that it is costing you completions.
Low friction
From 5 to 6
A good result. Most people got through without having to think about it.
Effortless
From 6 to 7
The flow is close to invisible. Spend your time on a worse one instead.
CES questions, answered
Customer Effort Score measures how much work it took someone to get something done. People rate a flow they just completed on a 1 to 7 scale, and the score is the average of those ratings.
Add up every rating and divide by the number of responses. If 166 people give ratings adding up to 842, your CES is 5.07 out of 7.
Either works as long as you never change it. This calculator treats 7 as very easy. Inconsistent polarity across surveys is the single most common way teams make their CES history useless.
For a specific flow, yes. CES predicts continued use better than the other standard surveys and points at a step you can fix. It cannot tell you how people feel about your product overall, which is what NPS is for.
Report the average as the headline and keep the share nearby. The average moves smoothly enough to track over time, while the share tells you how many people are actually struggling.
Ask what made it difficult, and show it only to people who gave a low rating. Those answers usually name the exact step to fix, which is the whole point of running CES rather than a satisfaction survey.
Measure effort where it happens
Flows drops a CES question at the end of any flow in your product and branches to a follow up question based on the answer.
