CSAT Surveys: A Detailed Guide on Importance, Calculation, and Improving CSAT Scores

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Do you know your customers’ opinion about your products and services? How do they feel about the quality of your customer support?What do you think is the best way to find this out?

Well, the best and the most straightforward way to genuinely find it out is by asking them. This is the reason why so many companies are so keen on deploying CSAT surveys for their customers.

Introduction to CSAT surveys

The most common way to measure how customers feel about your products and services is by sending customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys that help customers rate their experiences and share open-ended feedback.

A CSAT survey proves to be a useful channel especially for unsatisfied customers to voice their opinions and issues, in turn, giving the company an opportunity to regain the unhappy customer’s trust before it’s too late.In this post, we’ll cover the ins and outs of the CSAT score, what is considered a good CSAT score, how the CSAT score is calculated, its importance, and ways to maximize your CSAT score.

Let’s get started.

What is a CSAT score?

CSAT score, short for customer satisfaction score, is a customer experience metric that measures how your customer feels about your product, service, or support. It essentially measures your customer’s happiness with your overall company and service through a CSAT survey.It is a commonly-used key performance metric used to figure out how satisfied customers are with your company’s offerings and overall service.

CSAT surveys consist of questions that help determine customer satisfaction with a specific experience.A typical example of a CSAT survey question would be: How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the customer support you received? Answer choices are graded on a scale, usually from 1-5, 1 representing highly unsatisfied and 5 representing highly satisfied.

What is a good CSAT score?

A good CSAT score will typically lie between 75% and 85%. However, it’s important to note that CSAT scores vary by industry. It’s difficult but normal to obtain a near-perfect CSAT score. That’s because these scores measure only your promoter scores.

A CSAT score of 75% is excellent, but not always easy to achieve. This score essentially means that three out of every four of your customers gave you a positive score instead of a negative one. Even though it can be painful to read negative responses, they’re in fact, much more helpful.

Anything around 50% or higher is usually considered an excellent CSAT survey response rate. In fact, the average CSAT survey response rate across all industries is about 15%. And that’s good enough too.

The number of customers responding to your surveys can vary on factors such as how you distribute your surveys and how fast and easy they are to complete. Also, a lot depends upon the demographics of the audience you’re surveying.

How to Improve Your CSAT Score

To improve your CSAT scores, you should start by analyzing your customer journeys. The more you’ll place your customer’s needs and expectations at the heart of your operations, the higher would be your customer satisfaction.

Here are some of the best strategies you can implement to improve your CSAT score:

1. Improve customer support

A recent report published by Statista in Feb 2021 shows that in 2020, 40% of customers in the United States reported that they stopped doing business with a company as a result of poor customer support.

This indicates that poor customer service is a significant deal breaker for a large part of consumers. Did you know that you could lose half of your customers to a competitor after a single bad customer experience? Consider using AI tools to monitor and analyze your customer support data, and translate the data into action. These tools prove to be a lot more accurate than human analysis.

2. Offer multi-channel support

Today, simple phone and email support are not enough. You need to be present in places where your customers live. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or not.Your support must be convenient for your customers, which means you need to offer multi-channel support – with in-app chats, on your social media channels, and website, among all other potential communication channels.

According to the Zendesk CX report, companies who perform better at customer satisfaction rates are more likely to have adopted multi-channel support. The report shows that over 50% of high-performing international companies offer multi-channel support.

3. Ask for open-ended feedback

Honest and detailed feedback is a lot more than numbers and percentages. Open-ended customer feedback is feedback that can’t just be answered with a simple Yes/No or with multiple choice questions. Open-ended CSAT survey questions help obtain respondent’s raw opinions and feelings about your service.Techniques like sentiment analysis of survey responses can help you analyze thousands of open-ended survey responses.

Create powerful online CSAT surveys with Voxco’s online survey tools.

4. Close the feedback loop

The main purpose of a customer feedback loop is to gather, analyze, and act on customer feedback. The customer feedback loop is a strategy that helps ensure that you put your customer feedback to good use. CSAT scores are an important part of feedback loops since these loops use the scores along with other feedback data to gain insights into the whole customer journey.

After analyzing your customer feedback, ensure that you “close the loop,” and let your customers know that you have implemented the required changes. It will help your customers know that you’re listening to them.

Importance of your CSAT score

CSAT scores are a great indicator of customer loyalty. They are the standard for understanding how customers feel about your offerings and service.Determining the CSAT score is the first step to delivering exceptional customer service, which is a preliminary to a successful business.

Here are some reasons why measuring your CSAT score is so important:

1. Because even your most loyal customers can leave you in the blink of an eye

You can’t buy customer loyalty, you need to earn it. Tons of studies show that, in the US, organizations can lose upto 45% of their customer value, if customers are dissatisfied with the service.

The competition is too high today and your loss would be your competitor’s profit. A CSAT survey will help you determine important issues that need to be addressed, which will ultimately help ypi retain your customers.

2. Happy customers are returning customers

Satisfied customers not only spread a positive word of mouth but are also loyal to the brand despite the plethora of options offered to them.

Customer advocacy results in tremendous business growth, especially for small-scale business. Happy customers never turn to your competitor’s brand.

3. To personalize customer experience

An important prerequisite for customer satisfaction is to make sure every unhappy customer is contacted in person. Just offerings discounts will not help much if you really care about your customers for the long run. Instead, consider deploying regular CSAT surveys to measure how satisfied your customers are.

How is the CSAT score calculated?

The CSAT score is pretty easy to calculate.The average customer satisfaction score is a simple measurement that lets you get a rough idea about how happy and satisfied your customers are with your services or products.It is simply the percentage of all the CSAT survey responses you receive that are positive – i.e the sum of all positive responses, divided by the total responses collected, multiplied by 100.The result is the overall percentage of satisfied customers for your business.

For example, if you had 200 positive responses out of 400 total responses, your CSAT score would be 50% (200 positive responses / 400 total responses × 100).This score can be considered a good CSAT score indicating that almost half of your customers are satisfied with your offering, although there’s much more room for improvement.

The best thing about a CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) score is that it’s a very simple and easy way to close the loop on customer feedback.CSAT surveys are quick surveys that can be sent across multiple experiences during a customer’s journey to understand how they feel about your service and business offerings at various touch points.

Find potential bottlenecks and improve the customer experience by trying out this free sample CSAT survey.

Summary

It’s important you figure out what’s in the hearts and minds of your customers. After all, true success comes from understanding customer’s pain points and making them happy.Surveying your customers will help you measure their satisfaction levels and figure out what their needs and expectations are.

Before sending out surveys, it’s good to decide on the key interactions you want to measure and get feedback on. Consider measuring something tangible — like whether the customer is likely to recommend your business to a friend.

If you are not able to match customer expectations, you can easily resolve the problem by conducting regular customer feedback surveys. Uncover the key drivers of customer satisfaction with Voxco’s expert written survey template.