What is CSAT Score? - In-Depth Exploring

SHARE THE ARTICLE ON

CSAT- an acronym for Customer Satisfaction, is a commonly-used key performance indicator used to track how satisfied customers are with an organization’s products and/or services.

An important measure of a company’s success is its customers’ satisfaction with its offerings. While they may be buying from a particular brand, it’s not necessary that they’re also highly satisfied with its products or services and are intended to stay loyal to that brand.

This is why it becomes imperative for companies to measure their customers’ satisfaction and use it to improve the overall customer experience.

How highly customers are satisfied or dissatisfied with a brand is indicated by CSAT scores.

This blog will introduce you to CSAT Score and explore its intricacies.

What is the definition of a CSAT Score?

CSAT score or Customer Satisfaction score is one of the key customer loyalty and satisfaction metrics that indicates how happy your customers are with your products/services.

CSAT scores help businesses identify customer satisfaction levels after a specific interaction or in regard to their overall experience with the company. It can prove to be a strong indicator of short-term customer loyalty and customer retention and helps organizations understand customer sentiment and expectations.

Why is the CSAT score important?

CSAT scores help measure customer satisfaction and customer loyalty and help organizations gauge customer reactions to particular interactions or experiences. Satisfied customers are likely to spend more and stay longer with your organization. Additionally, they may even share their positive experiences with others, potentially bringing in more business.

CSAT is a touchpoint metric, as well as a relationship metric.

As a touchpoint metric, it can be used to collect feedback after certain customer interactions at every point of the customer journey. This helps understand customer satisfaction at every point of their journey and can highlight the points in which the organization may not be providing a good customer experience.

As a relationship metric, the CSAT score can be used to measure and evaluate overall customer experience with the organization. This gives organizations an idea of overall customer satisfaction in their end-to-end experience.

A wide range of online survey tool functionalities to create interactive surveys in seconds. Understand how easy it is to create, test, distribute, and design the surveys.

50+ question types
Advanced logic
White-label
Auto-translations in 100+ languages

How to Calculate CSAT score?

To calculate the CSAT score, you need first to conduct Customer Satisfaction Surveys or CSAT surveys.

CSAT surveys feature a single question that asks customers to rate a product or service on a five-point scale.

“How satisfied are you with your experience with us today?”

A five-point Likert scale with the following categories follows this question:

Rating of 1: Very dissatisfied
Rating of 2: Somewhat dissatisfied
Rating of 3: Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, or Neutral
Rating of 4: Somewhat Satisfied
Rating of 5: Very Satisfied

To calculate the CSAT score, you need to consider the total number of responses and the number of satisfied ratings (ratings of 4 and 5).

Your CSAT score is the sum of all positive responses divided by the total responses collected, then multiplied by 100.

Once you’ve obtained the responses to your CSAT survey, you can use the following formula to calculate your CSAT score.

Also read: How to Measure CSAT

Formula to calculate CSAT score

CSATisfaction scores are expressed as a percentage so that they will range from 0% to 100%.

For example, if 100 people respond to your survey and 75 of them are satisfied (they chose a score of 4 or 5, satisfied/very satisfied), then you have a CSAT score of 75%.

Such a customer satisfaction score indicates that a majority of people are satisfied with your offering while there’s enough room for improvement.

CSAT scores can be pulled from surveys like the example below by taking the number of positive (5 – 7) responses from the total responses collected.

Also read: Top 10 Customer Satisfaction Survey Questions

What is a Good CSAT Score?

According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, the current overall customer satisfaction in the U.S. is 76.5%.

However, there is no particular benchmark that defines a good CSAT score across all industries. This is because what is considered “good” will vary significantly by the type of industry you are a part of.

The benchmark for a good CSAT score can be defined by the industry your organization is a part of. For example, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), the CSAT benchmark for the American airline industry is 75%. Therefore, if American Airlines has a CSAT score of above 75%, they have a good CSAT score. However, if their CSAT score is significantly below 75%, they have a bad CSAT score.

The American hospitality industry has a benchmark of 69%. Hence, while a score of 70% may be considered good for an American hospital, the same score would be considered bad for American Airlines.

As the benchmarks for what is good depend on the industry you’re in, organizations often compare their CSAT score with the industry benchmark. The industry benchmark for a CSAT score will dictate whether your CSAT score is good or not.

How to gather CSAT data?

However, here we will discuss many forms of gathering the insight instead of the mode of data collection. In this sense, there are two more ways of collection CSATisfaction score, i.e., NPS and CES surveys.

1. Net Promoter Score Surveys:

NPS® is a measure of long-term customer loyalty.

Ulike CSAT, which is expressed on a scale of 0-100, NPS® is expressed on a scale of -100 to 100. A negative score indicates that the company has more detractors than promoters, and a positive score indicates the opposite.

What is the difference between CSAT and NPS®?

While NPS® and CSAT all measure how your customers perceive your company, products, and services, there are nuances that make them stand out from each other.

CSAT is Customer Satisfaction, which helps you measure how happy and satisfied customers are with the products they have used, while NPS® is a Net Promoter Score®, which helps you measure customers’ loyalty and how likely they are to recommend your product to their friends and family.

NPS® is more correlated with customer loyalty than other metrics, and it is more focused on long-term growth because the NPS® question asks about the intention to recommend in the future rather than focusing on current satisfaction.

On the other hand, customer satisfaction is about current sentiment about an immediate interaction, and customer satisfaction is a more holistic view of loyalty to a brand.

2. Customer Effort Score Surveys:

The CES is a metric that evaluates how easy you have made it for your customers to do business with your company. It helps you understand what issues customers face when reaching out to your company for help or services and how it impacts their satisfaction.

How easy was it to connect with our customer service agent? Asking customers to rate their experience can help you identify where they may be experiencing difficulty. By identifying these areas you can make timely improvement and simplify complicated or frustrating process.

One-stop-shop to gather, measure, uncover, and act on insightful data.

Curious About The Price? Click Below To Get A Personalized Quote.

Improve your CSAT Score

Now that you have gathered the score and compared it with industry benchmark, there is a lot that needs to be done to improve customer satisfaction. Here are some best practices that you can implement in your customer experience strategy to improve the CSAT score of your company.

1. Gather data on customer satisfaction across every stage of customer lifecycle.

2. Follow up on any satisfaction or experience feedback that customers leave.

3. Engage unhappy customers to understand how you failed their expectations.

4. Reach out to happy customers to identify what interventions rewarded positive feedback.

5. Integrate regular feedback collection.

Also read: How to improve your CSAT score?

Why Choose Voxco to Measure Your CSAT Score?

Here are a few reasons why Voxco is your best bet to conduct your CSAT survey:

1. Omnichannel Survey Software

With Voxco’s centralized survey authoring, you can create surveys and send them across multiple channels without the need for reprogramming for every medium. As you can connect with customers over a wide variety of channels, you can maximize your survey response rate.

2. Access to Survey Templates

With Voxco, you have access to existing templates created by our team of professionals. This includes a CSAT survey template, which you can easily customize to your needs and deploy across channels.

3. Powerful Dashboards

Voxco’s powerful and dynamic dashboards efficiently analyze survey responses for you and present visual stories of the data collected. This makes it easier for you to identify trends and patterns and extract actionable insights from the data.

Voxco is trusted by 450+ global brands in 40+ countries for their research needs. See how Voxco can help you gather relevant insights.

The higher your CSAT score, the better

Entrepreneurial success is all about customer satisfaction. Measuring the CSAT score will put in light on how successful are your customer experience strategies. CSAT (and NPS®) scores should be supplemented with further qualitative research to understand the drivers behind the scores so you can take action to improve key areas. When you understand how satisfaction ties in with revenue, you can start to make a marketing impact.