CSAT stands for "Customer Satisfaction." It is a metric used by businesses and organizations to measure how satisfied their customers are with their products, services, or overall experiences.
CSAT is typically measured through customer surveys or feedback forms, where customers are asked to rate their level of satisfaction after a particular interaction or transaction.
CSAT is a well-established metric for measuring customer satisfaction. It is a straightforward way to understand how customers think or feel about your products or particular elements of your service and experience.
How do you measure CSAT?
CSAT is based on asking your customers the following simple question (or very similar):
How satisfied are you with your experience?
Often, we give respondents the option to rate their experience from 1 to 5 – with one being very dissatisfied and five being very satisfied. Responses can also be divided from 1 to 10 (similar to net promoter scores).
The CSAT calculation is simply the percentage of satisfied responses.
For example, out of 100 respondents, if 34 say they are “satisfied,” scoring you 4, and 30 say they are “very satisfied,” scoring you 5, the overall CSAT would be 64%.
Why measure CSAT?
Reduce customer churn
There are many drivers for customer churn. Individuals may have personal economic reasons for changing their shopping habits, and broader societal changes such as rising inflation also cause consumers to switch brands.
But customer dissatisfaction is a massive driver for churn too. 88% of consumers say they will switch to a competitor after three or fewer bad experiences. The critical difference for brands here is that churn, which occurs for CX reasons, is more often avoidable.
It is this avoidable churn – which is costing businesses around $136 billion a year – that CSAT can help brands address. If we have a measure of how satisfied our customers are with our products and services, we can understand their issues.
We can then make a special effort to improve customer satisfaction in those areas, boost our CSAT score, and lower our churn rates.
Learn about your customers
CSAT can be a great insight into understanding customers' thoughts and feelings. It can help give you a more comprehensive picture of why they behave the way they are.
Perhaps a design tweak in your online shopping cart is decreasing conversions. Asking the CSAT question after checkout will be able to pinpoint the satisfaction levels your customers have with this part of your CX and whether the change you have made is driving the drop-off.
This is a great insight to help you build your strategies.
But CSAT is a straightforward metric you can easily pass on to other stakeholders to help them learn more about your customers, too – such as the team who are best placed to make a fix or the managers in charge of allocating more resources to get something changed.
Improve customer experience
CSAT is a valuable metric for gathering insight into how satisfied your customers are with all aspects of your business – from the products and services you offer to your CX.
Customer experience is more critical than it ever has been. Many businesses – from market leaders to industry disruptors – are making CX central to their operations. It is the best way to keep ahead of your competitors.
But we can only improve customer experience if we understand what our customers think and feel.
This can be challenging in an omnichannel world where customer journeys are increasingly personalized. CSAT can be used to dig into CX issues throughout the customer journey – from the checkout to delivery to post-purchase support.
This kind of granular detail about how satisfied your customers are across the whole experience they have with you can highlight the most significant pain points and help you prioritize what needs to be addressed.
Inspire loyalty, repurchases, and advocacy
Reducing churn, learning about customer behavior, and improving CX all contribute to promoting loyalty.
The fact is, today, consumers are less loyal than they ever have been. A competitor is often just a click away, and businesses must work even harder to keep customers returning.
It is worth the effort. Retailers have a 60% to 70% chance of selling to an existing customer compared to a 5% to 20% chance of selling to a new one.
Keeping customers satisfied and nurturing that loyalty can improve their customer lifetime value (CLTV), promote better repurchase rates, and even turn indifferent customers into evangelists for your brand.
What is a good CSAT score?
Your CSAT score is worked out as a percentage.
It makes sense that anything close to 100% indicates that your customers are satisfied. Likewise, anything over 50% shows that more customers are satisfied than unsatisfied. And anything under 50% suggests there is clear room for improvement.
It is also essential to consider that average customer satisfaction scores vary from industry to industry.
For instance, Statista Customer Satisfaction Index benchmarks from 2022 show businesses in the leisure sector to boast the highest average scores at 81.7%. Utility businesses, on the other hand, have a much lower average at 74.5%.
What are the pros and cons of CSAT?
Pros of CSAT
As we have covered, CSAT is a simple calculation. It is easy for you and your colleagues to get some base-level insight quickly.
It is also a concise question for customers to answer, meaning you will likely get more responses than you would with a longer customer survey.
Another benefit of CSAT is its adaptability. The question can easily target specific customers and certain parts of the customer experience. For example: How satisfied are you with our check-out experience? How satisfied are you with the support you have received today?
Cons of CSAT
As is the case in all areas of customer feedback, there is a risk of response bias with CSAT.
Additionally, CSAT offers limited detail as to what might be driving satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
You can get around this by using a free text field that you can then use a feedback analytics tool to analyze. Other recommended customer experience metrics and how they differ from CSAT
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Like CSAT, net promoter scores can help us understand customers' thoughts and feelings. It measures loyalty by seeking to establish the likelihood that respondents will promote the brand to another person.
The NPS question is often worded as such: On a scale of 1-10, how likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend?
Respondents are then put into one of three categories: detractors (those who answered 0-6), passives (those who answered 7 or 8), and promoters (those who answered 9 or 10).
Relational NPS is often used to gather customers' general feelings towards a brand, while transactional NPS can be sought after specific customer interactions for a more granular insight.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
CES is an area of customer satisfaction measurement that delves into the effort customers have to put into interacting with your brand or their difficulty.
Whether a customer is resolving an issue with your support team, trialing a new product, or simply making a purchase, you want them to do so with minimal effort.
CES questions are often worded in the following way: How difficult was it for you to resolve your issue today? How difficult is it to use this product?
Lower CES indicates that you are providing a good customer experience. If customers rate products as challenging to use or find parts of your CX confusing, they are more likely to churn and switch to a competitor.
Net Sentiment
Net Sentiment score is something we have developed here at Chattermill. It is a universal approach to measuring customer experience across various channels.
It looks at all of your data sources – including social media, online reviews, and customer feedback – and subtracts the percentage of negative theme mentions from the percentage of positive ones. The result is a score ranging from -100 to 100.
How to find out what’s really driving your CSAT score
CSAT is helpful for finding out how satisfied your customers are.
The “How satisfied are you with your experience?” question can be pitched at different parts of the customer journey to gain insight into satisfaction after specific interactions.
Here at Chattermill, however, we are all about Unified Customer Intelligence.
We use automation, AI, and machine learning to understand more deeply the metrics from all your customer data sources – from CSAT to NPS, CES, net sentiment, and more – to give you a comprehensive, holistic understanding of your customers.
Brands need to know how satisfied their customers are. They need to know which points on the customer journey are more satisfying for users and which are not. But they also need to understand why customers are or are not satisfied.
This level of insight can only really be found in written feedback. But tools such as Chattermill are essential for transforming that feedback into insights and presenting it alongside trends from other sources.
This provides a single source of customer truth for your brand. And it ensures that you are on the front foot when improving your CX.
What is CSAT (Customer satisfaction score)?
CSAT stands for "Customer Satisfaction." It is a metric used by businesses and organizations to measure how satisfied their customers are with their products, services, or overall experiences.
CSAT is typically measured through customer surveys or feedback forms, where customers are asked to rate their level of satisfaction after a particular interaction or transaction.
CSAT is a well-established metric for measuring customer satisfaction. It is a straightforward way to understand how customers think or feel about your products or particular elements of your service and experience.
How do you measure CSAT?
CSAT is based on asking your customers the following simple question (or very similar):
How satisfied are you with your experience?
Often, we give respondents the option to rate their experience from 1 to 5 – with one being very dissatisfied and five being very satisfied. Responses can also be divided from 1 to 10 (similar to net promoter scores).
The CSAT calculation is simply the percentage of satisfied responses.
For example, out of 100 respondents, if 34 say they are “satisfied,” scoring you 4, and 30 say they are “very satisfied,” scoring you 5, the overall CSAT would be 64%.
Why measure CSAT?
Reduce customer churn
There are many drivers for customer churn. Individuals may have personal economic reasons for changing their shopping habits, and broader societal changes such as rising inflation also cause consumers to switch brands.
But customer dissatisfaction is a massive driver for churn too. 88% of consumers say they will switch to a competitor after three or fewer bad experiences. The critical difference for brands here is that churn, which occurs for CX reasons, is more often avoidable.
It is this avoidable churn – which is costing businesses around $136 billion a year – that CSAT can help brands address. If we have a measure of how satisfied our customers are with our products and services, we can understand their issues.
We can then make a special effort to improve customer satisfaction in those areas, boost our CSAT score, and lower our churn rates.
Learn about your customers
CSAT can be a great insight into understanding customers' thoughts and feelings. It can help give you a more comprehensive picture of why they behave the way they are.
Perhaps a design tweak in your online shopping cart is decreasing conversions. Asking the CSAT question after checkout will be able to pinpoint the satisfaction levels your customers have with this part of your CX and whether the change you have made is driving the drop-off.
This is a great insight to help you build your strategies.
But CSAT is a straightforward metric you can easily pass on to other stakeholders to help them learn more about your customers, too – such as the team who are best placed to make a fix or the managers in charge of allocating more resources to get something changed.
Improve customer experience
CSAT is a valuable metric for gathering insight into how satisfied your customers are with all aspects of your business – from the products and services you offer to your CX.
Customer experience is more critical than it ever has been. Many businesses – from market leaders to industry disruptors – are making CX central to their operations. It is the best way to keep ahead of your competitors.
But we can only improve customer experience if we understand what our customers think and feel.
This can be challenging in an omnichannel world where customer journeys are increasingly personalized. CSAT can be used to dig into CX issues throughout the customer journey – from the checkout to delivery to post-purchase support.
This kind of granular detail about how satisfied your customers are across the whole experience they have with you can highlight the most significant pain points and help you prioritize what needs to be addressed.
Inspire loyalty, repurchases, and advocacy
Reducing churn, learning about customer behavior, and improving CX all contribute to promoting loyalty.
The fact is, today, consumers are less loyal than they ever have been. A competitor is often just a click away, and businesses must work even harder to keep customers returning.
It is worth the effort. Retailers have a 60% to 70% chance of selling to an existing customer compared to a 5% to 20% chance of selling to a new one.
Keeping customers satisfied and nurturing that loyalty can improve their customer lifetime value (CLTV), promote better repurchase rates, and even turn indifferent customers into evangelists for your brand.
What is a good CSAT score?
Your CSAT score is worked out as a percentage.
It makes sense that anything close to 100% indicates that your customers are satisfied. Likewise, anything over 50% shows that more customers are satisfied than unsatisfied. And anything under 50% suggests there is clear room for improvement.
It is also essential to consider that average customer satisfaction scores vary from industry to industry.
For instance, Statista Customer Satisfaction Index benchmarks from 2022 show businesses in the leisure sector to boast the highest average scores at 81.7%. Utility businesses, on the other hand, have a much lower average at 74.5%.
What are the pros and cons of CSAT?
Pros of CSAT
As we have covered, CSAT is a simple calculation. It is easy for you and your colleagues to get some base-level insight quickly.
It is also a concise question for customers to answer, meaning you will likely get more responses than you would with a longer customer survey.
Another benefit of CSAT is its adaptability. The question can easily target specific customers and certain parts of the customer experience. For example: How satisfied are you with our check-out experience? How satisfied are you with the support you have received today?
Cons of CSAT
As is the case in all areas of customer feedback, there is a risk of response bias with CSAT.
Additionally, CSAT offers limited detail as to what might be driving satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
You can get around this by using a free text field that you can then use a feedback analytics tool to analyze. Other recommended customer experience metrics and how they differ from CSAT
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Like CSAT, net promoter scores can help us understand customers' thoughts and feelings. It measures loyalty by seeking to establish the likelihood that respondents will promote the brand to another person.
The NPS question is often worded as such: On a scale of 1-10, how likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend?
Respondents are then put into one of three categories: detractors (those who answered 0-6), passives (those who answered 7 or 8), and promoters (those who answered 9 or 10).
Relational NPS is often used to gather customers' general feelings towards a brand, while transactional NPS can be sought after specific customer interactions for a more granular insight.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
CES is an area of customer satisfaction measurement that delves into the effort customers have to put into interacting with your brand or their difficulty.
Whether a customer is resolving an issue with your support team, trialing a new product, or simply making a purchase, you want them to do so with minimal effort.
CES questions are often worded in the following way: How difficult was it for you to resolve your issue today? How difficult is it to use this product?
Lower CES indicates that you are providing a good customer experience. If customers rate products as challenging to use or find parts of your CX confusing, they are more likely to churn and switch to a competitor.
Net Sentiment
Net Sentiment score is something we have developed here at Chattermill. It is a universal approach to measuring customer experience across various channels.
It looks at all of your data sources – including social media, online reviews, and customer feedback – and subtracts the percentage of negative theme mentions from the percentage of positive ones. The result is a score ranging from -100 to 100.
How to find out what’s really driving your CSAT score
CSAT is helpful for finding out how satisfied your customers are.
The “How satisfied are you with your experience?” question can be pitched at different parts of the customer journey to gain insight into satisfaction after specific interactions.
Here at Chattermill, however, we are all about Unified Customer Intelligence.
We use automation, AI, and machine learning to understand more deeply the metrics from all your customer data sources – from CSAT to NPS, CES, net sentiment, and more – to give you a comprehensive, holistic understanding of your customers.
Brands need to know how satisfied their customers are. They need to know which points on the customer journey are more satisfying for users and which are not. But they also need to understand why customers are or are not satisfied.
This level of insight can only really be found in written feedback. But tools such as Chattermill are essential for transforming that feedback into insights and presenting it alongside trends from other sources.
This provides a single source of customer truth for your brand. And it ensures that you are on the front foot when improving your CX.
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