A customer can walk away satisfied and still exhausted: three contacts, two handoffs, one week. Effort is the part CSAT misses, and research consistently links high effort to repeat contacts and churn. Simplesat runs CES the same way it runs CSAT: triggered by your helpdesk, answered in a click, reported next to the comments that explain it.

How it works in Simplesat

1. Choose CES as the primary question

Customers rate "The company made it easy to handle my issue" on a 1-to-7 disagree-to-agree scale, the Gartner-adapted standard. Your CES score is the share of customers who answer 5 or higher.

2. Trigger it after resolution

The same helpdesk events that fire your CSAT survey can fire CES: solved, closed, or a custom status.

3. Ask where the effort was

A follow-up question catches the cause: had to contact you twice, waited too long, got passed around, unclear answer.

4. Find the friction patterns

Filter to high-effort responses and let topics group the comments, then drill from a pattern straight to the underlying tickets.

5. Fix it and re-measure

Change the macro, the routing, or the article, then compare CES before and after to see whether friction actually fell.

What you can do

• CES on the standard 1-7 agree scale; score = share rating 5 or higher, not a mean
• Run CES alongside CSAT and NPS in one account, one dataset
• Follow-up questions to pinpoint the source of effort
• Filter, topic-group, and drill to the tickets behind high-effort responses
• Deliver by email embed, chat, or web
• CES is one question: it tells you effort was high; the comments tell you where