What is customer satisfaction score?

Why it matters

CSAT is the closest thing support has to a direct read on the customer experience, and it is the natural counterweight to efficiency metrics. Any automation programme that raises deflection while CSAT falls is destroying value, and CSAT is the fastest way to see that happening.

What to know

• Response rates are typically low and skewed toward the delighted and the furious, so read trends rather than absolute levels.
• CSAT measures the interaction, not the relationship. For the relationship, use NPS or a periodic relationship survey.
• Segmenting CSAT by issue type and by resolved-versus-escalated is where the actionable signal lives.
• Surveying immediately after the contact produces different numbers than surveying a day later, so keep the timing fixed.
• Free-text comments attached to low scores are usually more useful than the score itself.

How to calculate it

An example

Example: 400 customers respond to a post-chat survey, and 340 pick four or five out of five. CSAT is 85 percent. If only 400 of 6,000 contacts responded, that is a 6.7 percent response rate, and the number describes a self-selected minority.

Common mistakes

• Reporting CSAT without reporting the response rate beside it
• Comparing your CSAT to another company using a different scale
• Surveying only resolved tickets, which quietly removes the unhappy cases
• Treating a one-point move as signal when the sample is small

Questions