CSAT is the abbreviation for a Customer Satisfaction Score that is used to measure how satisfied a customer is with a product or service provided by your business.
How do you measure CSAT?
There is no shortage of suggested ways to measure CSAT if you do a quick search on the internet.
There are different ways to ask the questions and different scales you can use e.g. 1 to 5, 1 to 7, 1 to 10 or scales like very unsatisfied to very satisfied.
Regardless of which method you use, the main objective is to capture how satisfied a customer is with your businesses products or services.
An example CSAT survey question:
How satisfied were you with your experience today?
| Worst | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | Best |
Expanding on CSAT
Getting a score is great, but asides from a number, it doesn’t really tell you much other than the degree of customer satisfaction.
But you still don’t understand WHY they gave you that score.
As a result, many CSAT surveys will now ask for additional information based on the score you provided.
For example, if you scored a one:
Oh no, we are sorry to have let you down. What could we have done better?
How to calculate CSAT
You guessed it, there are lots of different approaches but most commonly, you take the highest score(s) and divide that as a percentage of the overall respondents.
So using the above survey example:
- 10 customers scored you a 7 and 10 customers gave you a 7
- 100 customers completed the survey
Your CSAT score is 20% (2o out of a 100 customers rated you a 6 or 7)
When do you measure CSAT?
Again, lots of different approaches although the most common approach is to use CSAT at specific points in the Customer Journey rather than an overall indicator which can be better served by other metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Effort Score (CES).
Combining CSAT with Customer Journey Mapping can provide you with valuable intel on what areas/stages of your business need to be improved.
This could be at:
- Support interactions
- Sales interactions
- Check out process
- Onboarding
Popular methods of asking your CSAT question include:
- Automatic after call surveys
- Emails
- In person
Risks of using CSAT
Whilst the intent is great, there are some inherent risks with CSAT which has given rise to other Voice of the Customer programs.
Risks include:
- What means ‘satisfied’ to you might mean something different to me.
- Is satisfaction something you really want to aim for anyway? Satisfied customers are not necessarily loyal and raving fans about your brand. When someone is describing your business would you rather customers saying “these guys were awesome” or “wow, that service was excellent” compared to “Oh yes, I was satisfied with that experience”?
- The biggest risk of all VOC programs is doing nothing with the information and the same applies to CSAT. If customers have taken the time to provide you with feedback, analyse it and use it to improve your business. There is now powerful software (Customer Analytics) that can analyse thousands of feedback responses and identify trends for your data. Whilst that is great for your business, individual customers couldn’t care less so I recommend still ensuring that you respond to any customer that has given you feedback – it will do wonders for your business.
So while CSAT has its place in determining the Voice of the Customer, it should be used as part of a collective group of measures rather than just all by itself.
Recommended further reading: View all our expert articles on how to improve your customer experience
Search a list of suppliers that can help improve or measure your Customer Satisfaction on our free CX Directory >>>or find a list of upcoming industry training courses >>>
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