The Ultimate Guide to Understanding CSAT and Its Importance

Customer satisfaction surveys are essential for understanding and measuring your brand’s performance. When triggered at key moments throughout the customer journey, they can produce valuable insight into your customer’s experience with your product or service.

The key is to ensure you’re timing your surveys well to give you actionable CSAT data and feedback. If you ask too early, you risk annoying your customers with a survey they can’t respond to.

What is CSAT?

CSAT is a standard customer satisfaction measurement that measures overall customer happiness. It can be used to compare a business against industry standards and competitors and identify sudden customer satisfaction dips that require immediate attention.

Most companies use CSAT surveys asking, “How satisfied are you with our product/service/support?” Surveys can be sent via email, app, or in-person and based on specific journey touchpoints like after onboarding, a purchase, or a service call. These surveys typically ask respondents to rate their satisfaction using a scale of numbers or symbols, such as stars and emojis.

In addition to closed questions, some surveys include open-ended questions allowing customers to write their responses. This can provide rich insight into the root causes of dissatisfaction, but this data type requires additional analysis.

To get actionable data, asking the right questions at the right time is important. For example, if you offer a subscription-based service, it’s best to send a CSAT survey a few months before renewal so that you can make any necessary changes before the client decides not to renew their subscription. Similarly, it’s crucial to ask for feedback on all aspects of your product instead of just one component, as this can lead to more detailed and helpful results.

How to Measure CSAT

As a customer experience metric, CSAT scores are essential for any business that wants to put its customers first and deliver a great CX. However, it’s important to understand how CSAT fits into a wider framework of metrics and best practices, especially when measuring the customer experience across multiple touchpoints.

CSAT surveys are quick and easy to conduct and provide quantitative data that’s easy to analyze. They usually consist of a single question with a rating scale (Happy, Neutral, Unhappy) and can be delivered through various channels. Often, the ratings are color-coded to reduce the response burden and make it easier for customers to answer – this is especially helpful if you’re concerned about cultural bias.

Typically, companies ask a question like “How satisfied were you with the service you received from us?” and then calculate the percentage of respondents who were either Very or Extremely satisfied. Some businesses may also use a visual rating system that uses words or international symbols instead of numbers, such as a smiley face, stars, or a neutral expression. This allows customers to be more subconscious and honest in their responses. It’s also a good idea to ask open-ended questions that allow for more detailed, qualitative feedback.

How to Use CSAT Data

The best use of CSAT data is to identify customer expectations and ensure your teams are meeting those expectations. It also allows you to spot at-risk customers and make a proactive effort to keep them onboard.

Because CSAT surveys typically ask only one question, they are quick and easy for customers to respond to, so you can get a high response rate. They are also more likely to be answered if delivered at key customer journey touchpoints, like after a support interaction or purchase.

When used with other survey data, CSAT can help identify trends or patterns causing customer dissatisfaction or leading to churn. For example, you receive many negative comments about slow delivery times. In that case, you can work to address those issues with your logistics partners or develop new shipping options for your customers.

Remember that CSAT scores are based on self-report and are limited in capturing nuance or granularity in a customer experience. Also, because it’s a blunt measure of positivity or negativity, CSAT is only sometimes the best fit for products or services that have a wide range of possible experiences. Still, if your CSAT score improves consistently over time, that’s a good sign that you are doing something right.

How to Improve CSAT

Measuring customer satisfaction is one of the most important steps in ensuring your product or service meets users’ expectations and provides them with a positive experience. However, getting actionable insights from CSAT data can be difficult if collected and analyzed improperly.

By collecting feedback correctly, you can identify opportunities to improve customer support processes, products, or other business aspects that are causing customers pain points. You can then use this feedback to create more personalized interactions with your users and ensure your customers feel valued.

It’s best to send CSAT surveys soon after a support interaction to keep the experience fresh in your customers’ minds. You can also use customer experience management software to automate the collection of this feedback, allowing you to stay on top of new responses and insights as they come in. You can filter feedback by ratings, keywords, or even operational data to pinpoint specific pain points faster and to gain more context when acting on the results of your CSAT survey.