Customer Effort Score (CES)
A survey metric asking how easy it was to accomplish something ("The company made it easy to resolve my issue" — agree/disagree). High effort is one of the strongest predictors of disloyalty.
Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how much work a customer had to do to get value: resolve a support issue, complete setup, find an answer. The classic form asks the customer to rate agreement with a statement like "the company made it easy to handle my issue" on a numbered scale. The premise, supported by a well-known body of service research, is that reducing effort drives loyalty more reliably than delighting customers does — people rarely leave because they were insufficiently delighted; they leave because things were hard.
CES works best as a transactional pulse on the moments where effort concentrates: support resolutions, onboarding completion, renewals paperwork. A worsening CES on onboarding, for example, is an early-warning signal that time-to-value is slipping. As with any survey metric, the score matters less than the follow-through — each high-effort response should generate follow-up work, and recurring themes should feed the product and process backlog.