Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is a metric that measures how happy a consumer is with a business’s services, products, or customer support. CSAT is calculated with the help of customer feedback and is presented as a percentage ranging from 0 to 100.

Here, 0% would mean horrendous service or completely unsatisfied customers, and 100% would mean a spectacular experience suggesting that the buyer is super pleased. If your consumers are happy with your services or business as a whole, you’ll see that reflected on the CSAT results. If the contrary is true, then it’ll also be obvious on the scoreboard.

Customer satisfaction surveys are used to gather feedback from your consumers regarding services and products your business offers.

You can collect the data by asking this question:

”How satisfied are you with the services provided/ products received/ brand name?”

Consumers can use the following scale to record their responses:

1. Extremely unsatisfied
2. Somewhat unsatisfied
3. Neutral
4. Somewhat satisfied
5. Extremely satisfied

Customizing your CSAT question

CSAT surveys often consist of a two-part question. Customizing it can help you gather truly helpful information for achieving your goals.

The first part of the CSAT question can be tailored according to the type of services you provide.

For example, you can phrase the question like this,"Overall, how would you rate your satisfaction level with the product/service?".

Next, you can include an open-ended feedback form as the second part of the question. This can help you understand the customer's reasons for giving you a particular score.

Since consumers have the whole comment box to express themselves and don't have to select numbers as answers, they can better explain what they mean.

Where necessary, you can also add an optional third question, such as,” How likely are you to buy another product from us?”. This will help you further explore how satisfied your users are with your brand.

To truly understand how CSAT works, you need to focus on two questions:

1. Why measure CSAT?
2. How to measure CSAT

Only after becoming familiar with the answer to these questions will you be able to leverage the sheer brilliance of CSAT to your advantage and expand your business goals.

Why measure CSAT?

You should measure CSAT because it produces easily-processable data. The output lets you understand consumer behavior and happiness. This helps you create a good user experience.

Driving intel from concrete and actionable metrics is important for making data-driven decisions. CSAT offers that and more.

Along with Net Promoter Score (NPS), CSAT is regarded as one of the most authentic benchmarks for customer experience. Measuring customer satisfaction via surveys can help enterprises improve their products and services.

CSAT provides information on both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of user experience. This knowledge helps you understand how happy customers are with your brand. It works by:

• Identifying important issues
• Understanding your customer
• Delivering more than promised
• Creating better opportunities

Let’s try to understand each of these:

Identifying important issues

CSAT focuses on the issues your customers are facing. It identifies the exact pain points that must be addressed. This lets you distinguish recurring issues from other problems.

Understanding your customer

You need to understand your buyers first if you wish to improve your customer experience. You also need to know how they interact with your business across different touchpoints. CSAT, when combined with analytics and insights, can help you learn a lot. This is especially true when it comes to the level of satisfaction your target audience has with your offerings.

Deliver more than promised

How you meet customer expectations tells you a lot about how your brand is perceived. It also provides insights into the value you place on user experience based on the processes you have in place.

CSAT helps you examine the different touch points and timelines of consumer feedback. It helps you learn what your user expects of your brand. Understanding these lets you deliver more than what your customer hopes for.

Create better opportunities

CSAT surveys can be customized according to the demands of the industry.

It allows enterprises to evaluate customer satisfaction at every stage. From onboarding to sales and initiation of the consumer journey to after-sales support. This is how CSAT helps create better opportunities for interaction and user retention.

How to measure CSAT

To measure your CSAT score, focus on the highest values you got as feedback on the survey form. For example: survey data collected from the respondents must be evaluated to isolate satisfied and very satisfied responses, as these can help you predict customer retention.

To calculate CSAT, you’ll also need to keep a record of the total number of responses received in order to get a final percentage for CSAT metrics.

Formula

To get the percentage, you need to divide the total number of customers (4 and 5 scores) by the total number of respondents multiplied by 100.

[Total number of customers / Total number of respondents] x 100

Now that you’ve got your survey results, you must be wondering what’s next. That’ll be interpreting CSAT scores so you can set a baseline and understand whether your business is performing well or not.

But CSAT scores can vary industry-wise. It depends on the type of business you run and the services you offer. You can check out indexes like the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) to explore the different average industry benchmarks.

Other than satisfaction, CSAT gives you an overview of customer sentiment as well. Understanding it can help you shape user journeys.

Simply put, If you have satisfied customers, you’ll have a good CSAT score.

CSAT bridges the gap between your intel on customer satisfaction and what you can do to improve it. But it also has limitations that you need to know about. Understanding these can help you get useful information out of your survey.

Advantages

• It’s easily measurable
• It produces data that can be interpreted effortlessly
• It’s easier for consumers to understand
• It is popular with customers
• It predicts customer churn

Here are brief explanations of each advantage:

It’s easily measurable

CSAT can help you uncover more information with a single question than you can with multiple survey questions. This is especially true when it comes to recording customer responses. As such, CSAT is easier than other customer experience metrics to work with for data acquisition.

It produces data that can be interpreted effortlessly

From onboarding to purchasing, CSAT can be used to collect feedback at every step of the consumer journey. Since the scores are displayed in the form of numbers, they are easier to understand.

For example; A happy customer can tick off the number 5 (extremely satisfied option) on the CSAT survey. An unhappy buyer can similarly tick off number 1 (extremely unsatisfied option).This produces numerical data which can be interpreted effortlessly.

It’s easier for consumers to understand

Unlike other surveys, you don’t need to inundate your customers with lots of questions when asking them to fill out a CSAT survey. Users can simply answer a single two-part question, which is enough to collect feedback. This is why consumers find it easy to understand.

It is popular with customers

CSAT is one of the most heavily benchmarked customer experience metrics. Moreover, the survey consists of only one question and is widely used, making it popular with consumers. Using a globally renowned survey helps understand buyers' sentiments, regardless of their location. This is why businesses worldwide use CSAT to measure their buyers' happiness and satisfaction.

It predicts customer churn

It's challenging to spot unhappy customers (detractors) with limited customer data. But with CSAT, you can evaluate specific interactions between the people and your brand, as well as their overall experience. This way, it becomes easier to identify customer churn (when they’ll leave). And you can focus your retention efforts on the pain points to improve overall satisfaction.

Disadvantages

• It is susceptible to human error
• It has potential for cultural bias
• It measures post-interaction sentiment only

It is susceptible to human error

Any survey can be susceptible to human error, and the same can be said of CSAT. Whether the form contains a single question, or utilizes templates that include follow-up questions, mistakes can always be made. For example, your survey may focus on the wrong things or it might be structured in a way that a customer interprets differently from the way you would.

It has potential for cultural bias

Customer satisfaction metrics deal with macroscopic views of happiness and dissatisfaction. Users from various regions can express these sentiments differently. For example, an Australian can rate service quality as “terrible” or “super”. In contrast, a user from the United Kingdom can choose to reply with “very bad” or “extremely satisfied”. Therefore, surveyors need to keep an eye out for bias as it can impact the overall scores.

It measures post-interaction sentiment only

CSAT measures how a consumer is feeling about your services right after they have had an interaction with your brand. This is where the metric can face limitations in terms of survey responses and response rates. It can be affected by the user’s mood on any given day.

In simple words, a visitor having a bad day can affect your scores. Similarly, a buyer’s happiness can also prove lucky for you. Overall, it might not be such a bad thing given your objectives.

Here are the differences between each of these metrics:

1. CSAT measures customer satisfaction or how happy the consumer is with the business’s products and services.
2. CES stands for customer effort score, and it measures how difficult or easy it was for the user to resolve their issue.
3. NPS stands for Net Promoter Score. It measures customer loyalty and how likely a consumer is to recommend the business to their friends.

To help you understand better, let’s go through a scenario in detail:

1.) The buyer reaches out to customer support because they had issues with their purchase.

2.) Their call gets picked up by an agent who can't authorize the refund or replacement.

3.) The representative then very politely explains the situation to the customer and lets them know they need to consult another team - then confirms if a 10-minute wait is acceptable.

4.) Upon the buyer's agreement, the agent puts them on hold. It takes more than 10 minutes, but the service staff picks the call back up at the 10-minute mark to give an update. They reassure the caller that they're still working on the issue.

5.) Five minutes later, the refund is approved and the customer is told the transaction will be reflected in their bank statement within 12 hours.

6.) The call ends.

Now, given this scenario, the following can be true:

1.) Because the agent took good care of the customer and gave them what they wanted, the CSAT score for this interaction is likely to be high.

2.) That being said, the process still took 20 minutes, and there was no way for the caller to have resolved the issue by themself. So CES is probably not going to be good in this case.

3.) Still, the way the agent handled the issue (establishing clear expectations, reassuring the buyer, etc.) mitigates any stress the situation may have caused. This means the customer is more likely to give the company's support team a shout-out. Which will be indicative of a decent net promoter score.

All in all, CSAT benchmarks are influenced by negative feedback on the one hand and by how a customer feels (essentially their positive responses) on the other hand.

With CSAT, you can create fruitful user journeys by improving experiences throughout the customer lifecycle. 8x8 can help you claim a well-deserved breakthrough by simplifying interaction and improving engagement.

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