Is Customer Effort Score (CES) replacing Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) metrics?
Krzysztof Burzyński,  February, 2026.

CSAT was neither telling, if customer issue was solved nor how much consultant effort it took...

And now Gen AI is coming to the service desks. The main result expectation appears to be effective resolution of customer cases with lower costs and  still satisfied customers.

In this context it appears that Customer Experience (CX) leaders are shifting their focus towards a more pragmatic metric: the Customer Effort Score.

So it's no longer about satisfaction, but about minimizing the actual effort required for both customers and employees to complete their tasks.

Thanks to AI and journey analytics organizations can quantify and eliminate friction points, taking the "chaos" out of business communications across all channels altogether.

From another angle:

Obviously, as customer cases are getting more and more complex, without help of AI the traditional CSAT is going down. So perhaps it's a way to run away from it!