Measure how easy it was to complete a task and capture the friction behind high-effort experiences.
How easy was it to get the outcome you wanted?
Start with the complete working structure, then adjust the language, timing, and incentive to fit your customers and brand.
Best used when
Your team has a specific decision or growth objective and needs a focused artifact to move from planning to launch.
How easy was it to get the outcome you wanted?
ratingWhy ask it: Difficulty is an earlier warning than dissatisfaction, because people tolerate an average experience and quietly abandon a hard one. Ask it in the hour after the task ends, while the customer can still name the step that slowed them down, and read the hardest answers next to the ticket or page where the effort happened.
What is the main reason for your answer?
open textWhy ask it: The score records what happened and this records why, which is why it belongs immediately after the rating while the customer is still holding the thought. Read it grouped by score: the reasons behind low answers are your fix list, and the reasons behind high answers are the next line of your product page.
What is the one thing we could improve?
open textWhy ask it: Asking for one thing instead of general feedback forces a priority, so the answers arrive already ranked by what the customer cares about most. Count how often each theme repeats rather than reacting to the most articulate response, and carry the top three into the next planning cycle.
Is there anything else you would like us to know?
open textWhy ask it: The last question is where the unprompted things arrive: a packaging complaint, a size you do not stock, one support agent thanked by name. Keep it optional and last so it costs nothing in completion, and lean on AI analysis to group the themes once you pass a few hundred responses.
Generate a focused variation while keeping the expert-written version available as your baseline.
Add your goal and audience. If AI is unavailable, the complete template on this page still works as a practical starting point.
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Three specifics worth checking against your own store before you launch.
Start with the focused version, publish, and let the first answers steer the next iteration.
Ask within the hour of the task ending, while the friction is still a specific memory
Name the task inside the question, so easy means easy to return, not easy in general
Group high-effort answers by task type each month and remove one step from the worst one
Strong execution usually comes from removing ambiguity and keeping every action tied to the original objective.
Surveying after every interaction until customers stop opening anything you send
Asking about the experience in general, which turns an effort score into a mood score
Watching the average when the entire signal lives in the tail of high-effort answers
Scoring the support agent rather than the process the agent was forced to follow
It is a rating of how easy it was to get one specific thing done, asked immediately after the customer does it. The idea behind it is simple: people rarely leave a brand because an interaction was merely fine, but they do leave after a hard one. It is a task metric, so it only works when the question names the task.
At the end of a task, inside the hour. Good moments are a support ticket closing, a return being accepted, an exchange completing, or a subscription being paused. Avoid sending it on a schedule detached from an event, because how easy was it has no meaning without a specific it.
Satisfaction asks how the customer feels about the result, effort asks what it cost them to get there, and the two come apart constantly. A refund granted after four emails scores well on satisfaction and badly on effort, and the effort answer is the one that tells you what to change. Run satisfaction on outcomes and effort on processes.
Read it as a bug report about your process. Group the answers by task and count the steps customers name: a policy that forces a second email, a return label sent in a separate message, a form asking for the order number they already gave you. Delete one step a month and the score moves for real, which it never does from a better apology template.
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