Customer Satisfaction Score, or CSAT score, is a customer experience metric that measures happiness with a product, service, or customer support interaction through a customer satisfaction survey that asks: “How satisfied were you with [company]?”
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To truly understand the answer to “what is CSAT?”, it’s important to look at why and how to measure CSAT through surveys. Once you understand the basics, you’ll be better able to leverage CSAT metrics to enhance the customer experience, improve customer loyalty, and stay ahead of customer churn.
Knowing what is CSAT and how you can benefit from measuring customer sentiment is the first step toward driving business-critical decisions through data.
CSAT is one of the most heavily benchmarked customer experience metrics outside of NPS®. Companies that measure customer satisfaction with CSAT software gain valuable technology-based insights that can greatly impact the success of their new products, services, and solutions. CSAT surveys provide a quantitative metric of how satisfied customers are, and more importantly, qualitative feedback that explains why.
The root cause of dissatisfaction often boils down to expectations. CSAT questions gather point-in-time feedback for different customer touchpoints to reveal customers’ expectations, whether you meet them, and how to do better.
CSAT scores help identify the most significant issues your customers are facing. CSAT ratings also help recognize how much pain each of those issues is causing, allowing you to address them more effectively and strategically.
All industries can use targeted CSAT surveys to identify pain points around sales, onboarding, customer service, product, internal processes, and other key touchpoints. You can improve the customer and employee experience and ultimately increase brand loyalty and customer lifetime value.
To focus on CSAT throughout the customer journey means that you will discover data-based insights about who your customers are, what they care about, and how to cater to them better than competitors throughout all interactions.
Now that we’ve covered “what does CSAT mean?”, let’s move on to why CSAT scores can be the key to selling more products, improving customer engagement, and providing good experiences for your customers.
Companies differentiate themselves on their customer experience. Assure prospective customers by publishing your CSAT score alongside your first response time to show that post-purchase care is both swift and high quality.
At scale, it can be hard to tell who your unhappy customers are simply by referencing business metrics. Metrics like customer satisfaction survey scores help identify customers who are likely to churn, so you can resolve their pain points early.
Your customers expect and want positive experiences. Generally, customers base their decisions to buy again on whether they were happy the first time. Measuring and calculating your CSAT score keeps you in the know of the most extensive issues and allows you to track how your improvements boost your score over time.
An effectively designed customer survey garners useful feedback while respecting your customer’s time. Here’s how the standard CSAT questionnaire works, and how you can customize it to suit your exact needs. Once you see what a simple and easy measuring method this is for both you and the customer, you’ll understand why CSAT surveys are so ubiquitous.
The most basic CSAT survey is a two-part question. The first question, “How satisfied were you with [product/interaction]?” can be modified to suit your situation. Customers respond with a 1-5 rating scale, which is rolled up into an easily benchmarked CSAT metric.
You will need to determine which customer experience touchpoint you would like feedback on, since this impacts who receives the survey, question phrasing, and survey distribution. The CSAT survey question can be customized for any interaction.
The second part of the CSAT survey is an open comment form, where customers can explain why they chose the customer satisfaction rating in their own words. Since customers aren’t prompted with answer options, they are free to share the defining factor that influenced the score.
Though you always want to keep your surveys short and to the point, you can add optional questions to your survey (after the initial CSAT question) for more information. Delighted allows you to customize up to 10 Additional Questions for deeper insights.
In some cases, a 5-star or Smileys rating scale may make more sense to include in your survey than a numerical scale. Graphic scales are intuitive and language-agnostic, and can make your survey more fun to take. Just be sure to adjust the initial survey question to make sense with the scale.
Combine CSAT with other customer experience survey types for a complete assessment of your brand.
NPS is a customer experience metric that has been correlated to future company growth. It is most commonly used to measure the overall customer experience, as opposed to specific customer touchpoints. Learn more in our NPS guide.
CES is a metric tied specifically to ease. It is generally used to gather feedback wherever ease of experience is important, such as in the resolution of a customer service/contact center issue or a web user experience. Learn more in our CES guide.
Once you’ve figured out who you want to survey and what you’ll ask, the next step is following survey distribution best practices for the highest possible response rate.
Use the distribution method that aligns most closely with the interaction that has just taken place. For ecommerce, a website survey can gauge content satisfaction. For email support, follow up with an email survey. For live chat, send a URL link at the conclusion of your conversation. Use in-person kiosks for brick-and-mortar locations.
CSAT surveys tend to be one-off surveys because they gauge satisfaction after a specific interaction. To keep response rates high, make sure you’re not over-surveying the same customer, that surveys are triggered upon completion of the interaction, and that you’ll be able to respond to any feedback received to ensure the customers feel heard.
Your customer satisfaction score is a CX metric used to understand how satisfied a customer is with a business experience or specific interaction. It is seen as one of the most popular and necessary metrics for providing quality CX, but do you know how to calculate CSAT scores?
To perform a CSAT score calculation, take the number of satisfied customers (those who rated you 4 or 5), and divide by the total number of answers. For example, if 62 of your 100 responses have a rating of 4 or 5, your score would be 62.
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Monitoring and tracking your CSAT score over time will provide a high-level gauge of whether you’re making progress. Dips in the CSAT score range and trend line single out new issues that will require further analysis.
As you start collecting data to find out what your CSAT is, it’s essential to do something with the insights you gain from the analytics. While your CSAT score is a great benchmark for reporting over time, the root cause is in the open-ended comments. Read through them to identify trends that lead to insights.
Experience management software often speeds up the process by surfacing commonly used words that appear in the feedback, or by segmenting comments as they come in using keywords that you identify. Filter feedback by rating, keyword, or customer type to reach insights faster and stay on top of new survey results.
Associate operational customer data (price tier, services used, support channel, geographical location, customer lifetime value, etc.) to the customer feedback so you have greater business context around the feedback received. Doing so helps isolate the root cause behind certain pain points and prioritizes areas to improve.
Acknowledge that you’ve received your customer’s feedback by closing the loop and acting on CSAT feedback.
Let the customer know that their feedback is appreciated by closing the loop. If they’re unhappy, proactively provide an avenue for resolution. If they’re completely satisfied, see if they’re willing to act as a reference or help with referrals. Happy customers often become your biggest advocates.
Make sure customer feedback gets in front of the people who effect change. Use integrations to pass feedback data, or customer service scores, into your customer database, operational systems, and communication tools, so process owners understand how they can improve.
If your customer experience program is set up for feedback on the entire customer journey, you’ll be able to ensure a stellar customer experience at every touchpoint.
“SUPER happy with the sales process. You understood my needs, provided a competitive quote, and really helped through onboarding.”
“Generally satisfied, but the page load times are pretty slow, so can be frustrating. I’d be your biggest fan if that issue could be fixed!”
“Olivia is professional, helpful, and very knowledgeable. Overall very happy with her performance and with the company as a whole.”
CSAT isn’t limited to B2B software or B2C retail customers – any industry can use CSAT to get feedback from employees and colleagues in addition to end users.
“Project team understood the urgency of what was being asked. Updates were proactively provided. Process was flawless.”
“I like the people here, but there isn’t a lot of room for growth. Not sure advancing my career is a real possibility here.”
“The curriculum is quite confusing. I feel the duration of the course is not suitable considering how much is covered.”
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