Fly with a US airline and the follow-up email asks how satisfied you were with the trip. Chat with your internet provider and the window closes with a question about how easy the fix was. Stay with your bank long enough and, once a year, it wants to know whether you’d send a friend its way. That’s three separate numbers, and people lump all of them together as “customer satisfaction.”
NPS, CSAT and CES are the three metrics businesses use most often to gauge how satisfied and loyal their customers are. The NPS (Net Promoter Score) is about recommendations, the CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) is about how one experience went and the CES (Customer Effort Score) is about how much work one task took. Below you’ll find where the three overlap, where they split and which one belongs at which point in the customer journey.
📌 Key takeaways
- NPS, CSAT and CES each boil down to one core question.
- NPS tracks loyalty, CSAT tracks satisfaction, CES tracks effort.
- CSAT and CES zoom in on single contacts, the NPS on the relationship.
- Used together, the three tell you the most.
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What NPS, CSAT and CES have in common
On the surface the three questions have little in common. Underneath, they share a design: a short, fixed question that a large number of customers can answer almost without thinking, which yields a number you can watch over time. Five traits follow from that:
- One question each: every metric rests on a single question with a set scale.
- A “why” underneath: the open follow-up is what turns a score into an action item.
- No changes between rounds: same wording, same scale, same timing, or the trend means nothing.
- History beats benchmarks: last quarter’s score is a fairer comparison than another company’s.
- No built-in explanation: none of them tells you by itself why it went up or down.
Employees get their own spin on the NPS, too: the Employee Net Promoter Score asks staff whether they’d recommend their employer to people looking for a job.
NPS, CSAT and CES side by side
Question, scale, math and timing are where the three part ways. Here’s the full picture in one table.
| NPS | CSAT | CES | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard question | How likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend or a colleague? | Overall, how satisfied are you with our service? | How easy was it for you to get your issue resolved? |
| Measurement | likelihood of recommending | satisfaction with one experience | work needed for one task |
| Answer scale | 0 through 10 | 1 through 5 | 1 through 7 |
| How it’s calculated | % promoters (9 or 10) − % detractors (0 through 6) | 4s and 5s ÷ all responses × 100 | total points ÷ number of responses |
| Possible results | anywhere from −100 up to +100 | anywhere from 0 up to 100 percent | anywhere from 1.0 up to 7.0 |
| Time frame | whole relationship, forward-looking | one contact, backward-looking | one task, backward-looking |
| Best moment to ask | on a set schedule, for example quarterly | right after a purchase, visit or delivery | right after a checkout, return or support ticket |
| Best at | a single loyalty number | pinpointing the weak touchpoint | uncovering process friction |
| Blind spot | can’t say where the problem sits | weak link to loyalty | ignores the product itself |
| Where it comes from | Fred Reichheld of Bain & Company, 2003 Harvard Business Review article | grew out of general customer research, no single author | Corporate Executive Board (now Gartner), 2010 Harvard Business Review article |
Our free calculators do the math for each one, so you can work out your NPS, work out your CSAT and work out your CES in seconds.
When to use NPS, CSAT or CES
You rarely have to choose just one. Each metric answers its own question and earns its keep at a different stage:
- Go with the NPS if you want a long-running read on how loyal your customer base is.
- Go with the CSAT if you need a verdict on one touchpoint, say a delivery, a consultation or an event.
- Go with the CES if a process needs fixing and you have to find the spot where customers stall.
Many teams run them as a set: CES and CSAT right after key interactions, the NPS every few months for the overall trend. If the NPS slips, the other two frequently reveal where the trouble began. Our guide to customer surveys shows how to plan a program like that.
Thinking about asking your customers for an NPS, CSAT or CES?
empirio.ai, an online survey tool from Germany, gets your customer survey up and running in a few minutes. You’ll find ready-to-use templates covering each of the three metrics among our customer feedback templates.