Key Takeaways
- The cross-industry average Customer Effort Score sits between 5.0 and 5.8 on a 7-point scale, with top-quartile performers reaching 6.2 or higher
- Gartner research found that 96% of customers who have a high-effort service experience become more disloyal, compared to just 9% who have low-effort experiences
- Low-effort interactions increase repurchase intent by 88% and reduce customer churn risk by 76%, according to Forrester and CEB/Gartner data
- Self-service and chat channels consistently outperform phone on CES, with self-service scoring 6.1-6.4 and phone averaging 4.8-5.4 across industries
- A 1-point improvement in CES is associated with a 10-15% increase in customer lifetime value in Zendesk benchmark data
Customer effort score benchmarks 2026
How hard is it for your customers to get help? That question - not satisfaction, not delight - predicts loyalty better than almost any other metric in customer service.
Customer Effort Score (CES) measures ease - not how satisfied customers are, but how much work they had to do to get there. The data is consistent: low-effort experiences reduce churn, produce more repeat purchases, and generate more referrals than high-satisfaction interactions that took real effort to navigate. What follows is the current benchmark data for CES across industries and channels, along with what the research says drives the gap between top-quartile performers and everyone else.
For related benchmarking, see CSAT score benchmarks by industry, customer support self-service statistics, and customer support channel preferences.
What CES measures and how it is scored
Customer Effort Score was introduced by CEB (now part of Gartner) in a 2010 Harvard Business Review article, "Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers." The original finding was that effort - not satisfaction - was the stronger predictor of disloyalty. Subsequent Gartner and Forrester research has repeatedly confirmed the relationship.
CES surveys are typically single-question: "How easy was it to get your issue resolved?" Responses are collected on either a 5-point scale (1 = Very Difficult, 5 = Very Easy), a 7-point scale (1 = Strongly Disagree, 7 = Strongly Agree that the company made it easy), or a 1-10 numeric scale. The 7-point scale is most common in enterprise benchmarking as of 2026.
CES is calculated as the average of all responses within the measurement period. Higher scores indicate lower perceived effort. Some organizations calculate a "net low-effort" figure (percent of low-effort responses minus percent of high-effort responses), similar to NPS methodology, but the simple average is more common for operational benchmarking.
Cross-industry CES benchmarks
CES benchmarks vary by industry based on issue complexity, channel availability, and customer expectations. The Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report (2025) and Gartner's Customer Service Effort benchmarking data provide the most comprehensive industry-level comparisons available.
| Industry | Average CES (7-point scale) | Top Quartile | Bottom Quartile |
|---|---|---|---|
| Retail / e-commerce | 5.6 - 6.0 | 6.3+ | Below 4.8 |
| SaaS / technology | 5.2 - 5.7 | 6.1+ | Below 4.5 |
| Financial services | 5.0 - 5.5 | 5.9+ | Below 4.4 |
| Telecommunications | 4.6 - 5.2 | 5.8+ | Below 4.0 |
| Healthcare | 5.1 - 5.6 | 6.0+ | Below 4.5 |
| Insurance | 4.8 - 5.3 | 5.7+ | Below 4.2 |
| Utilities | 4.7 - 5.1 | 5.6+ | Below 4.1 |
| Travel / hospitality | 5.4 - 5.8 | 6.2+ | Below 4.7 |
| B2B enterprise | 5.0 - 5.5 | 5.9+ | Below 4.4 |
The cross-industry average falls between 5.0 and 5.8 on a 7-point scale, with top-quartile performers reaching 6.2 or higher. Telecommunications and utilities consistently produce the lowest CES scores, driven by complex billing issues, lengthy authentication requirements, and limited self-service resolution paths for the most common contact reasons. Retail and travel score highest, partly because a larger share of contacts involve simple transactional queries with shorter resolution paths.
HubSpot's State of Customer Service report (2025) found that the median CES for businesses with a dedicated customer success function is 5.7, versus 5.1 for those without - a meaningful gap for a metric that moves in tenths of a point across most improvement programs.
CES benchmarks by support channel
Channel choice is the single largest driver of CES variation within an organization. The effort required to get help through voice, chat, email, and self-service is fundamentally different - not just in resolution time, but in the cognitive and procedural burden placed on the customer.
| Channel | Average CES (7-point scale) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Self-service / knowledge base | 6.1 - 6.4 | When resolution succeeds; failed attempts drive down to 3.5-4.0 |
| Live chat | 5.8 - 6.2 | Asynchronous read-back reduces re-explanation effort |
| Email / ticket | 5.4 - 5.9 | Async format reduces real-time burden; wait times add friction |
| Social media | 5.0 - 5.5 | High variance by brand responsiveness |
| Phone / voice | 4.8 - 5.4 | Authentication, hold times, transfers create high effort perception |
| AI chatbot | 5.6 - 6.1 | Mature implementations; drops to 3.8-4.5 for unresolved transfers |
Phone consistently scores lowest on effort despite being the channel customers often escalate to when other channels have failed. Gartner's research identifies the core drivers: customers must authenticate verbally, wait on hold, and - most damagingly - re-explain their issue if transferred. Each transfer event drops CES by approximately 0.5 to 0.8 points on a 7-point scale, according to Gartner's 2024 service effort analysis.
Self-service earns the highest CES scores when it works, but the conditional is critical. Forrester research finds that failed self-service attempts - where a customer tries the portal, cannot find a resolution, and then calls - produce some of the lowest CES scores in any channel (as low as 3.2 to 3.8), because the customer has now expended effort in two channels and must re-explain context in the second. Every unmaintained knowledge base article is a CES risk.
Zendesk's 2025 CX Trends data shows that AI-assisted chat channels score 0.3 to 0.5 points higher on CES than human-only chat, largely because AI tools eliminate the need for customers to hold while agents look up information, reducing perceived wait friction within the interaction.
How CES correlates with customer loyalty
CES has a cleaner loyalty correlation than most customer experience metrics, and the findings hold across independent research programs.
Gartner's original CEB data, updated in 2024, remains the most-cited finding: 96% of customers who experience high-effort service interactions become more disloyal, defined as decreased future purchasing, increased likelihood of switching, or negative word-of-mouth. Only 9% of customers with low-effort experiences show disloyalty indicators. That 87-point gap between high-effort and low-effort outcomes is what makes CES predictively valuable for revenue modeling.
Forrester's customer loyalty research quantifies the repurchase side: low-effort experiences drive 88% higher repurchase intent compared to high-effort interactions controlling for resolution success. This holds even when the outcome of the interaction is the same - customers who received a policy denial through a low-effort process show higher repurchase intent than those who received an approval through a high-effort one.
Zendesk's Customer Experience Trends 2025 benchmark data, covering over 100,000 companies, found that organizations in the top CES quartile had:
- 22% lower annual churn rates than industry averages
- 18% higher customer lifetime value
- 31% higher Net Promoter Scores
A 1-point improvement in CES on the 7-point scale corresponds to a 10-15% increase in customer lifetime value in Zendesk's modeling - one of the clearest ROI paths from a single metric available in customer service.
HubSpot's Service Hub Benchmark Report (2025) adds the cost dimension: customers who report low-effort interactions are 3x more likely to refer others and 2.4x more likely to increase spending versus those who rate interactions as high effort. On the cost side, high-effort interactions that require repeat contacts, escalations, or follow-up handling inflate per-resolution cost by 40-60% versus single-contact resolutions, per Gartner's service operations benchmarking.
Low-effort vs high-effort experience outcomes
The difference between a low-effort and high-effort experience is not just about resolution time. CEB/Gartner research identified the specific friction types that move customers from low-effort to high-effort perception - and they are operational, not attitudinal.
Repeat contacts are the most significant effort driver. Customers who must contact support more than once for the same issue rate the overall experience as high-effort 81% of the time, regardless of whether the issue ultimately resolved. Zendesk data shows that 34% of all support contacts in 2025 involved a customer returning about a previously raised issue.
Channel switching compounds effort. Having to move from self-service to chat to phone - what Gartner calls "channel hopping" - increases perceived effort substantially. CES scores for interactions involving two or more channel switches average 4.1 on the 7-point scale, versus 5.9 for single-channel resolutions.
Re-explaining context is a discrete, measurable effort driver. Gartner's analysis found that 62% of customers who were transferred to a new agent rated their effort as high, because they had to re-explain their issue. Organizations using unified customer data platforms that pre-populate context for receiving agents eliminate this driver and see CES gains of 0.4 to 0.7 points on transfer interactions.
Authentication friction, particularly in financial services, insurance, and healthcare, is consistently named as a high-effort driver. The average authentication process adds 2.5 minutes to handle time and reduces CES by approximately 0.3 to 0.5 points versus channels without mandatory verbal authentication.
Forrester's research on low-effort service programs identifies four operational characteristics common to top-quartile organizations. They communicate proactively before customers need to reach out, which cuts inbound contact about order status, policy changes, and billing. They maintain knowledge bases with active failure-state monitoring rather than letting stale articles pile up. Their agents are trained to anticipate and address the next likely issue during the current contact. And their channel design is built to keep customers in whatever channel they started in, rather than routing everything toward voice as a default escalation path.
CES by issue type
Not all contact reasons generate the same effort scores. Issue type is a stronger predictor of CES than channel or agent quality for complex problem categories.
| Issue Type | Average CES (7-point scale) | Primary Friction Driver |
|---|---|---|
| Order status / tracking | 6.0 - 6.3 | Low - typically single-lookup resolution |
| Billing inquiry | 5.2 - 5.7 | Hold times; multi-step verification |
| Returns and refunds | 5.5 - 6.0 | Policy navigation; documentation requirements |
| Technical troubleshooting | 4.7 - 5.3 | Multi-step, often requires repeat contact |
| Account access / credentials | 5.4 - 5.9 | Usually self-serviceable; effort drops when automation fails |
| Complaints / escalations | 3.8 - 4.5 | High by definition; policy constraints limit resolution options |
| Policy questions | 5.0 - 5.5 | Interpretation variance across agents creates inconsistency |
| Fraud / disputes | 4.2 - 4.9 | Investigation timelines create perceived effort |
Technical troubleshooting and complaints/escalations produce the lowest CES scores across industries. For technical issues, Zendesk's benchmark data shows that first-contact resolution rate is the dominant variable: contacts resolved at first touch score an average 5.8 on CES, while those requiring a second contact drop to 4.2. Escalated complaints are structurally difficult to score above 5.0 because the customer's prior experience already contains the high-effort element that triggered the escalation.
CES benchmarks vs NPS and CSAT
CES, Net Promoter Score, and Customer Satisfaction Score measure different things, and what you measure is what gets managed.
CSAT captures satisfaction with a specific outcome. CES captures how easy it was to reach that outcome. A customer can be satisfied with a resolution while also rating the process as high-effort - and Gartner and Forrester research consistently shows that CES predicts churn better than CSAT because effort is a loyalty driver independent of satisfaction. Customers can tolerate a bad interaction once; they leave because of accumulated effort. See CSAT score benchmarks by industry for comparison data.
NPS captures relationship-level loyalty. CES captures transactional friction at the interaction level. The two are correlated - Zendesk data shows 31% higher NPS for top-CES-quartile organizations - but NPS is also shaped by product quality, pricing, and brand factors that service operations don't control. CES is more operationally actionable because it maps directly to specific friction points that can actually be fixed.
HubSpot's benchmarking suggests using all three in combination: NPS for relationship health, CSAT for interaction quality, and CES for process efficiency. Teams measuring all three have the clearest picture of where customer relationships are at risk.
CES measurement best practices
CES surveys have a narrow measurement window. The data degrades rapidly with distance from the interaction - Gartner's research shows response quality is significantly higher when surveys are sent within 24 hours of the interaction versus 48-72 hours later.
The question wording matters more than it does for CSAT. CEB's validated wording - "The company made it easy for me to handle my issue" rated on a 1-7 Disagree/Agree scale - consistently outperforms open-ended or satisfaction-framed variants in predictive validity for churn. Deviating from validated question formats makes cross-industry benchmarking comparisons less reliable.
Response rates for CES surveys average 12-18% for email-based collection and 22-35% for in-session surveys embedded in chat or portal interfaces, per Zendesk benchmarking data. Low response rates aren't a reliability problem for CES in the way they are for NPS, because CES benchmarks are driven by score distribution rather than absolute response volume - but high-response-rate channels produce more granular issue-type breakdowns.
Segment CES by issue type and channel before comparing to benchmarks. A blended CES of 5.4 at an organization with heavy technical troubleshooting volume is functionally different from the same score at a retail operation handling mostly transactional inquiries. The industry tables above reflect issue-mix differences.
What the top-performing organizations score
Forrester's analysis of service organizations consistently rated as low-effort identifies CES profiles that exceed industry benchmarks by 0.8 to 1.2 points. The gap comes down to channel design, agent tooling, and knowledge management - not attitude or culture.
Top-quartile CES performers in retail and e-commerce regularly score 6.3 to 6.6 on the 7-point scale. In financial services - where structural complexity, regulation, and authentication requirements limit the ceiling - top performers reach 5.8 to 6.1. In telecommunications, which has the lowest average CES of any major industry, top performers still only reach 5.6 to 5.9, which underscores how much of the effort problem in that sector is structural rather than operational.
Gartner's 2025 service effort analysis found that the single highest-impact lever for moving from average to top-quartile CES was eliminating the need for customers to repeat information across contacts and channels. Organizations that deployed unified interaction history - surfacing all prior context automatically to any agent or channel handling a follow-up - achieved CES improvements of 0.6 to 1.1 points within 12 months of deployment.
For teams looking to close the gap to top-quartile performance, Forrester's guidance is consistent: fix the repeat-contact problem first. Every repeat contact is a compounding CES penalty. Teams that move first-contact resolution from 70% to 80% see CES gains of 0.5 to 0.8 points, and those gains are durable because they address effort at the root rather than at the measurement level.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good Customer Effort Score in 2026?
On a 7-point scale, a CES between 5.5 and 6.0 is above average for most industries. Top-quartile performers reach 6.2 or higher in retail and travel; in financial services and telecommunications, above 5.7 is considered top-quartile given structural complexity. Below 5.0 typically indicates systemic process friction worth addressing.
How is CES different from NPS?
NPS measures relationship-level loyalty and willingness to recommend. CES measures transaction-level effort on a specific interaction. CES is more operationally actionable for service teams because it maps to specific process points. NPS reflects product, brand, and pricing factors beyond what service operations control. Most customer experience programs use both.
What is the biggest driver of high CES scores?
Consistently, first-contact resolution and eliminating the need for customers to repeat information are the two highest-impact operational levers. Gartner's data shows that 62% of transferred customers rate their effort as high. FCR rates above 80% are associated with CES scores that are 0.5 to 0.8 points higher than organizations resolving below 70% at first contact.
Which industry has the lowest Customer Effort Score?
Telecommunications and utilities consistently score lowest, averaging 4.6 to 5.2 on a 7-point scale. Both industries have structurally high-effort contact drivers: complex billing disputes, authentication requirements, and a high proportion of contacts that cannot be resolved at first touch due to infrastructure investigation requirements.
How often should CES be measured?
For transactional CES (measured per interaction), continuous measurement is best practice, with surveys sent within 24 hours of each interaction. Gartner recommends minimum monthly reporting at the issue-type and channel level to catch friction trends before they compound into loyalty risk.
Sources
- Gartner / CEB Customer Effort research and service operations benchmarking (2024-2025)
- Forrester Research, customer loyalty and effort correlation studies (2024-2025)
- Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report (2025)
- HubSpot State of Customer Service / Service Hub Benchmark Report (2025)
- Dixon, Matthew; Freeman, Karen; Toman, Nicholas. "Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers." Harvard Business Review (2010, updated analysis 2024)
- Gartner, "Reducing Customer Effort: The Key to Loyalty" (2024)
- Forrester, "Customer Effort: The New Loyalty Battleground" (2025)
- Zendesk CX Trends: first-contact resolution and CES correlation data (2025)
For related benchmark data, see CSAT score benchmarks by industry, customer support self-service statistics, and customer support channel preferences.