They answer three different questions. CES measures how hard someone had to work to get something done with you, on a one-to-seven scale. CSAT checks happiness with one specific experience, on a smiley scale. NPS asks how likely someone is to recommend you on a zero-to-ten scale, and reads the whole relationship rather than a single interaction.

Send CES after a ticket closes or a session ends. Send CSAT after onboarding, a training, or a handoff. Send NPS on a set schedule, quarterly or twice a year, once clients have worked with you long enough to hold a real opinion. Start with one interaction survey and one relationship survey rather than running all three at once.

Three or four is plenty for a client check-in. Every question you add costs you responses, and the drop is steepest across the first few. A structure that works: one scored question you can trend over time, one open text question asking for the reason behind that score, and one asking what to prioritize next.

HubSpot's guidance is that anything above zero counts as good, since it means promoters outnumber detractors. Fifty and above is excellent, and seventy and above is the top tier and uncommon. The scale runs from minus one hundred to one hundred. Read the distribution too, since a score of twenty built from a pile of promoters and a pile of detractors hides a churn problem that the same twenty from mostly passives does not.