CSAT is short for customer satisfaction score. It’s commonly used as a key performance indicator. In other words, it helps you track how satisfied your customers are with your business, your products, and your services.

You can measure your CSAT with a simple, one-question survey.

In this article, we look at why CSAT is your key to long-term success and how you can leverage the data to improve your overall score.

Breaking Down the CSAT

 “How would you rate your overall satisfaction with X?” This is the question you’re asking customers.

For example, you might send a survey asking how satisfied a customer was with your customer support staff, or you might ask how satisfied a customer was with the product they just purchased.

The question asks customers to rate you from one to five on a five-point scale. The options would be very unsatisfied, unsatisfied, neutral, satisfied, and very satisfied.

You can calculate your CSAT in two ways. First, you can focus on your four-five responses. Or, you can average your scores to find the data.

We like using this formula:

(Number of 4 and 5 responses) multiplied by the (Number of total responses) x 100 = % of satisfied customers.

Doing it this way shows you how many customers are satisfied versus how many aren’t. The overall goal is 100% customer satisfaction and 0% customer dissatisfaction.

If you were to use the average, you can’t get a true percent of the number of happy, satisfied customers.

How is CSAT Different from NPS?

The CSAT measures customer satisfaction with your product or service while the Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer loyalty to your business.

It stands to reason that the scores would show similar things, but that may not always be the case. Why? Because the CSAT targets a reaction to a specific interaction a customer had with your business. It can’t gauge long-term loyalty.

Why is the CSAT Key?

In today’s ultra-digital, get-it-when-you-want-it world, customer satisfaction has never been more important.

It’s so important that your long-term success depends on it.

For your business to be successful, you need to know that every experience or touchpoint your customer has with your business is positive and leaves them satisfied.

This extends from your website, to your Facebook page, to the products you sell, to your service team.

It’s up to you to maximize each customer interaction with your business. Yet, if you don’t know how your customers feel about you, it’s hard to improve.

The CSAT solves that problem for you by letting you know how satisfied your customers are with their latest interaction with you.

If you find they’re unsatisfied, you can even follow up to learn what you might do to improve. Implementing changes that matter is key to your long-term growth.

To Conclude

Ultimately your goal is to improve the customers’ experience. To do this, you want to begin with a certain point in time. This happens after you send your first CSAT survey and have your data.

Once you get your results, you can make a hypothesis on how you can improve.  Make a strategy. Provide training for your staff.  Test your hypothesis over a set period of time.

Then, send another CSAT survey asking the same thing you did before your  set point.

Are your results different? If so, great. If they only bumped up a little, it’s time to go back to work and test again to see if you can get further improvements.

This means sending these surveys on an ongoing basis because you want to continue to gauge customer satisfaction.

Always follow up with the unsatisfied customers when you can. They have valuable information that can help you improve.

Increasing overall customer satisfaction is more that improving single interactions. It’s about improving them over time and on an ongoing basis. (tweet this)

Take a look at every touchpoint a customer might have with your company and go about improving their overall experience.

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Images: Marcin Kempa on Unsplash