CSAT and CES: How to Measure Customer Satisfaction and Effort

The customer received their order on time, quickly figured out the payment process, and did not contact support. Does this mean they are satisfied? Perhaps. But one order history alone cannot tell you that.

Customer experience includes details that sales figures alone do not reveal. How much did the person like the service? Was it easy to place an order, use rewards, or solve a problem? Two simple customer experience metrics are used to answer questions like these: CSAT and CES. They are similar, but they measure different things. CSAT shows satisfaction, while CES shows how much effort the customer had to make.

What is CSAT and how does it work?

Customer Satisfaction Score, or CSAT, shows how satisfied a customer is with a specific interaction with a company. For example, a purchase, delivery, salon visit, or conversation with support.

CSAT is a quick way to check the quality of individual touchpoints. It does not measure the overall attitude toward a brand, as NPS does, but the customer's impression here and now. Usually, customers are asked one question after a purchase:

“How satisfied are you with your most recent order?”

A scale from 1 to 5 is most commonly used:

1 — completely dissatisfied; 2 — somewhat dissatisfied; 3 — neutral; 4 — satisfied; 5 — completely satisfied.

The calculation is also simple. Responses of 4 and 5 are usually considered positive.

CSAT = number of satisfied customers / total number of respondents × 100%

Suppose 200 customers completed the survey. Of those, 164 gave a score of 4 or 5.

164 / 200 × 100% = 82%

The resulting CSAT is 82%.

What is a good CSAT score?

There is no universal number. The result depends on the industry, when the survey is conducted, and even how the question is worded. In Survicate's study of 1,259 CSAT surveys from 2025, the median result across all industries was 80%. The median was 84.2% for retail/wholesale, 80.9% for financial services, 79.2% for digital marketplaces, 77.8% for SaaS, and 93% for manufacturing/logistics.

However, these values should not be treated as mandatory benchmarks. A coffee shop, salon, or local store will benefit more from establishing its own baseline first and then tracking the trend. Growth from 69% to 78% may tell you more than a comparison with someone else's “ideal” score.

What is CES?

Now imagine a different situation. The customer is ultimately satisfied: they received the order and the rewards were credited. But to make that happen, they had to call support three times and manually restore their loyalty card. CSAT may be high because the customer ultimately got the result they wanted. CES, however, will reveal the problem.

CES stands for Customer Effort Score. It measures how easy it was for a person to complete a necessary action. The question can be worded like this:

“How easy was it to place your order?”

or:

“How easy was it to resolve your issue?”

CES often uses a scale from 1 to 7. The important thing is to define the direction in advance: for example, 1 means very difficult and 7 means very easy. The clearest calculation method is the average:

CES = sum of all scores / number of responses

Suppose ten customers gave a total of 58 points:

58 / 10 = 5.8

The CES is 5.8 out of 7. The closer the result is to the top of the scale, the easier customers find it to interact with the company. If you use the reverse wording, where a high score means more effort, the interpretation will also be reversed. This is why you should not change the scale between surveys: the comparison would lose its meaning.

How should you design a CSAT and CES survey?

The shorter the survey, the better. After an ordinary purchase, a person is unlikely to want to answer fifteen questions. For CSAT, simply ask about satisfaction with a specific experience. For CES, ask how easy it was to complete an action. You can then add one optional field:

“What could we do better?”

Do not combine everything into one long question. “How satisfied are you with the quality, delivery, rewards, and staff?” may produce a neat score, but it will be unclear what exactly the person was rating. Timing is another important factor. It is better to send the survey soon after the event. A month later, the customer is unlikely to remember how convenient it was to place that particular order.

How can a loyalty program help?

For CSAT and CES, a loyalty program is also useful as a source of feedback. After a purchase, the system can automatically send a short survey and connect the response to the customer's history. Instead of seeing an abstract 82% satisfaction score, you can understand who gave a low rating, what they bought, and whether they returned afterward.

What should you do if CSAT or CES falls?

Measurement alone will not fix anything. You need to find where the problem begins. If CSAT drops, review customer comments. The cause may be product quality, service speed, or the performance of a particular location. A low CES indicates something different: the customer journey is too complicated. Check registration, payment, reward redemption, digital card setup, and support interactions. Sometimes one unnecessary step is more frustrating than a small difference in price. It is easier to work in stages:

• find the stage with the lowest ratings;
• review customer comments;
• change one specific process;
• repeat the survey;
• compare CSAT, CES, and customer behavior after the changes.

Next, connect the ratings to sales. Do satisfied customers return more often? Do customers who find the program easy to use buy again? How does the average order value change?

This is where purchase frequency comes into play. Increasing it requires more than simply awarding additional rewards. Customers need to find those rewards easy to use. Simplify registration, display the current balance automatically, remind customers about rewards at the right moment, and do not make them search for program rules across several sections of the website.

In Loyallyst, it makes sense to use these surveys together with purchase history and segmentation. This way, the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Customer Effort Score (CES) stop being isolated numbers: you can see how customer experience relates to repeat sales and where the loyalty program genuinely supports retention.

If you need to understand how to measure customer satisfaction, start with CSAT. If you want to know how easy customers find it to interact with you, add CES. The best results come from using both metrics together: one shows the impression, while the other shows how much effort was required to achieve it.