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What is CSAT Score? Definition, Formula, and More What is CSAT score

What is CSAT Score? Definition, Formula, and More

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Improve Customer Retention

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- its meaning, definition, importance, and formula to calculate the CSAT score. 

Let’s start with learning its definition.

What is the definition of a CSAT Score?

CSAT score stands for Customer Satisfaction score. It 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.

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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.

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.

Formula to calculate CSAT score

What is CSAT Score? Definition, Formula, and More What is CSAT score

CSAT 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 CSAT 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.

Related: 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.

Download Free CSAT Survey Template

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.

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CSAT or NPS®: Which to measure?

CSAT and NPS® serve different purposes. CSAT measures user satisfaction and short-term customer loyalty, whereas NPS® is a measure of long-term customer loyalty. 

But unlike 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.

Therefore, when choosing which one to measure, it is important to first clearly define what you are trying to measure. CSAT would be more suited to your needs if you are trying to understand how your customers feel about a specific product, service, or interaction. 

However, if you want to measure customer loyalty based on their feelings toward the entire customer journey, then NPS® is the better option.

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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 lets you gather actionable insights with surveys designed by experts

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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.

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Get access to survey guides, market research tools, templates, and more.

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FAQs on CSAT Score

 Some of the most widely used customer satisfaction metrics are: 

  • Customer Satisfaction Score, or CSAT 
  • Net Promoter Score®, or NPS®
  • Customer Effort Score, or CES

CSAT scores can vary significantly by industry, however, a score above 75% is typically considered good across most industry types. 

 Once you’ve received your CSAT survey responses, the following formula can be used to calculate your CSAT score, which is expressed as a percentage: 

CSAT (%) = (No. positive responses / Total no. responses) * 100

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