Satisfaction surveys ask whether people liked it. That is worth knowing, but it misses the thing that actually drives people away: how much work you made them do to get there.
Customer Effort Score asks that directly. One statement, seven points of agreement, asked right after the interaction. It is a better predictor of whether someone stays than satisfaction is, and it points at something you can fix, because effort is made of specific steps you added.
The instrument, asked properly
The statement is the standard one: your product made it easy for me to handle my issue. Seven points run from strongly disagree to strongly agree, each with its own word and its own glyph, and the question is asked first so nothing else colors the answer.
All seven points arrive as a dropdown. That is deliberate. A five point scale fits a row of buttons and reads beautifully, but seven labeled options do not, especially in Discord. The menu shows each label in full instead of truncating it.
Your effort score is the share of people in the agree half, points five through seven. The results show you the full distribution, which is more honest than a single rollup and usually more informative.
Two questions that make the score actionable
A score on its own tells you there is friction, not where it is. So the template adds the reason in an open box, and a quick category for what the contact was about.
That second question is what turns a number into a finding. Effort that looks acceptable overall is often hiding one category where it is genuinely bad, and that is the queue to go fix.
Variants
- A different statement: any agreement sentence works with the same seven points, so ask about your docs, your setup flow, or your refund process.
- Five points: easier on mobile, at the cost of comparability with the standard measure.
- Paired with CSAT: alternate between them across contacts to see where satisfaction and effort disagree.
- Named ends instead of labeled points: number the points and name only the two extremes if you would rather keep the question visually lighter.