One in three customers would leave a brand they love after a bad experience. In the past, organizations could solely depend on the quality of their product to attract customers; these days, things are a lot different. Customers will abandon businesses that do not create the best experiences for them as they interact with their product or service. 

CSAT is an important metric that organizations use to track customer experience at specific touch points. In this article, we will show you how to calculate your CSAT and how you can use feedback from CSAT surveys to boost customer experience. 

What is CSAT?

CSAT means customer satisfaction score. It is an important metric used by businesses to determine customer satisfaction levels. Typically, brands evaluate customer satisfaction at different touch points including interactions before and after the purchase, the onboarding process and conversations with the customer support team. 

To measure CSAT, businesses can collect feedback from their clients using customer satisfaction surveys with rating questions. For instance, you can ask a question like “How satisfied are you with our service delivery?” And you’d include corresponding rating scale options like “very satisfied”, “somewhat satisfied” and the like. 

Another example is when you use a corresponding survey scale with numbers as options—each number represents a qualitative value with the first and the last numbers connoting extreme values. Here’s something that explains this point: 

How would you describe your experience with our customer support team? 

A. 1—Excellent

B. 2

C. 3

D. 4

E. 5—Poor

At the end of the survey, you will quantify the responses to give you a definite percentage. In this case, 100% would mean excellent while 0% would mean poor; scores like 45%–55% would be average. Sometimes, an organization can take the average of the CSAT survey results to arrive at a Composite Customer Satisfaction Score. 

When Should You Use Customer Satisfaction Score? 

1. Customer Lifecycle Moments: CSAT helps you to understand what your customers feel after they’ve gone through the bulk of the customer lifecycle. For example, if you send out a customer satisfaction survey after a client interacts with your customer support agent, you can get valid feedback about their experience and areas needing improvement. 

2. Prior to Renewal: A few months before a customer renews his or her product or service subscription, you should ask them to take part in a customer satisfaction survey. Typically, you should do this about 6 months before the renewal date so you’ll have enough time to act on their feedback and improve future experiences. 

Alternatively, you can draw up a schedule for your customer surveys, maybe on a monthly or quarterly basis so your customers can incorporate this into their own schedule. Doing this gives your organization a sense of people’s feelings when you’re not releasing products or doing anything different.

3. After Customer Support Touch Points: Every interaction a customer has with your support team leaves some sort of impression on them which can be positive or negative. Administering customer satisfaction surveys after each interaction gives you access to useful insights to improve your business. Something to note here is, these types of surveys should focus on gathering feedback on the immediate experiences of a customer and not their perception of your brand over a period. 

How to Calculate a Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) 

Your CSAT score is equal to the total number of satisfied customers from the survey divided by the total number of survey responses, and multiplied by 100. 

Organizing your customer satisfaction survey with Formplus makes it easy for you to calculate your CSAT score. With Formplus, you have easy access to survey data including the total number of form submissions and responses for each question.

Let’s say you sent out an online customer satisfaction survey and you got 200 responses at the end. Of the 200 responses, 100 respondents rated your business 4 or 5 to show they were satisfied with your service delivery, 50 customers said they were averagely satisfied while the other 50 said they were not satisfied at all (rated your business 1 and 2). 

To arrive at your CSAT score in this case, you’ll do the following: 

(Total Number of Satisfied Responses ÷ Total Number of Responses) X 100

(100÷ 200) X 100 = 50% 

So your CSAT score is 50% 

Advantages of CSAT 

There’s no better way to know how your customers feel about your product than to ask them directly. CSAT surveys are a full-proof method for gathering feedback from customers to help you understand their perceptions of your brand and how they would describe their customer experience. 

Still wondering whether CSAT is worth all the hype? Let’s look at 5 key benefits of this key performance indicator for your business. 

1. It is easy for organizations to capture and interpret CSAT data. Sometimes, all you need is a simple online opinion poll or survey distributed across major customer channels like social media platforms and your website. Once you collect this data, you can analyze it to know your CSAT.
2. CSAT is also convenient for your customers because they do not need to spend hours completing a lengthy survey. With just a few responses, they can provide the data you need. 
3. CSAT is a method of quantitative data collection. Quantitative or numerical data is user-friendly and easy to analyze. 
4. It is a standard method of measuring customer satisfaction and gathering feedback from clients. 
5. It provides actionable insights into the preferences of your target market. It allows your company to have a better understanding of your marketing efforts, and prioritize what customers really care about. 
6. CSAT is an important part of customer listening for businesses, and it helps you to build a customer-centric organization. 
7. CSAT surveys and other methods of measuring customer satisfaction allow for frequent communication between organizations and their clients. Conducting satisfaction surveys is a good way of keeping customers engaged with your brand. It shows customers that you really care about them, and that they are an important part of your business. 
8. CSAT allows you to monitor your brand’s performance in real-time and make the necessary adjustments. When you do this, you will improve customer experience which boosts your customer retention rates. When a customer is satisfied with your product and service, they are more likely to buy from you again and refer your business to their network. 
9. CSAT surveys keep you on top of consumer trends and behaviors. You’d know what customers are geeking over and this helps you to align your brand’s messaging with the right trends that key into your business goals.

Disadvantages of CSAT 

While knowing your CSAT score is great, it isn’t a full-proof method of measuring customer satisfaction. CSAT has several limitations which often give businesses the wrong impression of their customers’ experiences with the brand. Let’s go through some of the disadvantages of customer satisfaction scores.

1. It doesn’t provide in-depth information about how customers really feel. Satisfaction differs from one customer to another so you cannot depend on ratings for insights on customers’ true perceptions. 
2. CSAT only gives you insights on a customer’s latest touchpoint or interaction with your product. So, if you want to collect general impressions, you might not get objective answers.
3. The quality of data you get is affected by survey dropouts and bias. In fact, customers who are not satisfied with your product may not even bother to complete your poll or survey and this means the data you get becomes a false representation of your target audience. 

CSAT VS NPS 

If you work with a customer-facing team in your organization, you must be familiar with different metrics for measuring customer satisfaction. CSAT and NPS are two of the most common KPIs used in these contexts and it’s not unusual for people to take one for the other. So, how does CSAT differ from NPS? 

Definition

NPS or Net Promoter Score is generally used to measure customer loyalty while CSAT is used to measure customer satisfaction over a short period of time. In other words, while CSAT tells you what your customer thinks about your product or an experience they had with your organization, NPS gives you a clear sense of how likely your customers are to promote your product, service or brand in general. 

Purpose

Organizations use Net Promoter Score to track brand loyalty, repeated patronage and word-of-mouth referrals from their existing client base. On the other hand, CSAT allows businesses to track customer experience in real-time. 

Data Analysis

To measure CSAT, you need to divide the number of positive survey responses by the total number of responses and multiply the result by 100 to get the score in percentage. For Net Promoter Score, you’ll subtract the percentage of customers who are detractors from the percentage who are promoters. The result is a score between -100 and 100. 

Examples

An example of a NPS question is: 

How likely are you to buy from us again?

1. Very likely
2. Somewhat likely
3. Neither likely nor unlikely
4. Unlikely
5. Very Unlikely

An example of a CSAT question is:

How would you rate your shopping experience on our website?

A. 5—Excellent

B. 4

C. 3

D. 2

E. 1—Poor 

Essentially, if you want to rate brand shareability and customer loyalty over a longer time, you should administer a Net Promoter Score survey. However, if you want to get quick feedback about your customer’s experience with a specific process in your lifecycle or buyer’s journey, a CSAT survey is the way to go. On Formplus, you will find ready-to-use templates for NPS and CSAT surveys. 

The Best Questions for CSAT Surveys 

1. Rating Questions: A rating scale question is a close-ended survey question where respondents choose a corresponding comparative option to represent how they feel about a specific product or service. A rating scale question can be in the form of a likert scale, a semantic differential scale, a descriptive rating scale or a comparative rating scale. 

Rating questions are easy to understand and they help organizations to collect qualitative and quantitative responses from customers in CSAT surveys. By gathering comparative data, organizations can categorize responses easily to arrive at their customer satisfaction score. 

Examples of Rating Questions

A. To what extent was our product helpful?

• To a large extent
• Somewhat in the middle
• Not at all

B. The organization’s processes are well-streamlined.

• Strongly Agree
• Agree
• Neither agree nor disagree
• Disagree
• Strongly Disagree

2. MCQ: A multiple-choice question lists different options which customers choose from in response to a question. Sometimes, a multiple choice question can have only one right answer; some other times, respondents can choose as many responses as they want. There are different types of MCQs including questions with image options, radio questions and checkboxes. 

Examples of Multiple Choice Questions

A. How many interactions did you have with our support team?

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5

B. How long did it take you to resolve this issue?

• 10 minutes
• 30 minutes
• 1 hour
• 2 hours

3. Matrix Question: Matrix questions are closely related to rating scale questions. In this case, the questions are presented in some sort of grid with the same responses. These types of questions are close-ended and they require the respondent to evaluate one or more row items using the same set of column choices.

4. Table Question: A table question allows you to collect quantitative responses from your customers. Basically, it refers to a group of questions that share the same set of answer options. If you’re thinking that matrix questions and table questions are somewhat related, you’re right. Typically, a table question will have instructions, prompts, and a set of response options.

Conclusion 

Tracking your customer satisfaction score is one of the best ways to measure success with your customers. CSAT provides immediate feedback on a client’s experience with your brand and product, and you should act on this feedback fast to improve customer satisfaction. 

CSAT surveys provide a quantitative metric of how satisfied customers are, and more importantly, qualitative feedback that explains why. With Formplus. you can create different types of customer satisfaction surveys and questionnaires, to collect feedback from your clients seamlessly.