The customer satisfaction score, or CSAT score, is a customer experience metric that measures happiness with a product, service or customer service interaction through a customer satisfaction survey that asks: “How satisfied are you with [company]?”
1. What is CSAT?
To truly understand the answer to “What is CSAT?”, it’s important to look at why and how to measure it through surveys. Once you understand the basics, you can better leverage CSAT metrics to enhance the customer experience, improve customer loyalty and stay ahead of customer churn.
2. Why is it important to measure CSAT?
Knowing what CSAT is and how you can benefit from measuring customer sentiment is the first step to driving business-critical decisions through data.
CSAT is one of the most strongly evaluated customer experience metrics outside of NPS®. Companies that measure customer satisfaction with CSAT software gain valuable technology-based information that can have a major impact on the success of their new products, services and solutions. CSAT surveys provide quantitative metrics of how satisfied customers are and, more importantly, qualitative feedback that explains why.
You can read more about this at: What is Net Promoter Score? Complete guide to NPS
2.1. Learn about your customer
Focusing on CSAT throughout the customer journey means you will discover data-driven insights about who your customers are, what matters to them and how to serve them better than the competition across all interactions.
2.2. Drives experience improvement
All industries can use targeted CSAT surveys to identify pain points related to sales, onboarding, customer service, product, internal processes and other key touch points. You can improve the customer and employee experience and ultimately increase brand loyalty and customer lifetime value.
2.3. Discover the pain points
CSAT scores help identify the most important issues facing your customers. They also help you recognize how much pain each of those problems is causing, allowing you to address them more effectively and strategically.
2.4. Exceeds customer expectations
The root cause of dissatisfaction often comes down to expectations. CSAT questions collect timely feedback for different customer touch points to reveal customer expectations, whether you are meeting them and how to do better.
3. Why do it matter
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 delivering great experiences for your customers.
Companies differentiate themselves through customer experience. Reassure potential customers by posting your CSAT score along with your first response time to show that post-purchase care is fast and high quality.
At scale, it can be difficult to know who your dissatisfied customers are simply by referencing business metrics. Metrics such as customer satisfaction survey scores help identify customers who are likely to abandon, so you can address their pain points early.
4. Create your CSAT survey
An effectively designed customer survey elicits useful feedback while respecting customers’ time. Here’s how the standard CSAT questionnaire works and how you can customize it to meet your exact needs. Once you see how simple and easy this method of measurement is for both you and the customer, you’ll understand why these surveys are so important.
4.1. Examples of CSAT surveys
The most basic customer satisfaction survey is a two-part question. The first question, “How satisfied are you with [product/interaction]?” can be modified to fit a specific situation. Customers respond with a rating scale of 1 to 5, which is integrated into an easily comparable CSAT metric.
Open comments
Your CSAT survey can be an open-ended feedback form, where customers can explain why they chose the customer satisfaction rating in their own words. Since customers are not asked for response options, they are free to share the determining factor that influenced the score.
Optional additional questions
Although you always want your surveys to be short and to the point, you can add optional questions to your survey (after the initial question) to get more information.
CSAT rating scales
In some cases, it may make more sense to include a 5-star rating scale or a numerical scale in your survey. Graphic scales are intuitive and language independent, they can make your survey more fun to take. Just be sure to adjust the initial survey question to make sense with the scale.
5. Calculate your CSAT score
Customer satisfaction score is a CX metric used to understand how satisfied a customer is with a specific business experience or interaction. It is considered one of the most popular and necessary metrics for delivering quality CX, but do you know how to calculate CSAT scores?
To perform the score calculation, take the number of satisfied customers (those who rated you a 4 or 5) and divide by the total number of responses. For example, if 62 of the 100 responses have a rating of 4 or 5, your score will be 62.
Remember, to improve your online presence and stand out on Google and Google Maps, having a review and customer experience management strategy can make all the difference. You can count on RAY, a comprehensive solution that can help you improve your Google reviews, rank high in search results and provide an exceptional customer experience.
6. Keep learning with these articles
Hopefully, by now you have a solid understanding of what customer satisfaction scoring is, you can continue reading more articles that will help your brand or business in our Blog.
