CX Glossary

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

What is Customer Satisfaction?

How satisfied customers are with a company’s product or service. This is often one of the Key Performance Indicators as it shows how satisfied customers are with a company’s products, services, customer support and brand.  

Woman sitting in restaurants

Customer Satisfaction Score 

What is a good CSAT Score? Where are the industry benchmarks?

Customer Satisfaction Scoring: CSAT is scored on a scale of 1 – 10. It is calculated by taking the number of survey respondents who rated you a 8, 9, or 10 divided by the total number of survey respondents. 

  Example: You have 27 respondents that rated you a 8 and 15 respondents that rated you a 9, and 10 respondents rated you a 12 with a total of 100 survey respondents. The calculation would be (27+15+12)/100 = CSAT Score. In this example the CSAT Score would be 54. 

Average CSAT: The average CSAT rate across all industries is about 15%, however individual industry rates will vary. These are how the scores rate on an overall scale: 

  • CSAT Scores between 0 – 9 needs improvement
  • CSAT Scores between 10 – 19 are okay. 
  • CSAT Scores between  20 – 49 are good. 
  • CSAT Scores between 50 – 79 are great. 
  • CSAT Scores above 80 are excellent.

CSAT Scores by Industry: Knowing how your company stacks up against the average CSAT scores within your industry is important to know as different industries have different CSAT scores. You might feel you have a high CSAT score but it might be low compared to your industries average. 

  • Airline: 75 (2)
  • Automotive: 78 (2)
  • Food Service: 79 (2)
  • Hospitality: 76 (1)
  • Restaurants: 79 (2)
  • Retail: 79 (1)
  1. CSAT Scores
  2. Industry Benchmarks
5 Star Rating

CSAT Survey

In order to find out an CSAT Score, you need to ask customers the right questions.

CSAT Survey: The easiest way to find your CSAT Score is by including a question in your customer survey about how they would rate your company on a scale of 1 to 10. 
Example: On a scale of 1 to 10 how satisfied are you with Benbria’s Loop CX product? 

CSAT Survey Questions: Ensuring you get the customers in the correct mindset to ask that final question is important. If you are doing a very quick short survey then one of the questions could be similar to the one mentioned above, if you want to get more information from the survey then you could ask some of these questions to determine what the root cause of your CSAT score is: 

  • How long have you been using the product?
  • How often do you use the product?
  • What is your favourite thing about the product?
  • What about the product would you improve?
  • What features of the product do you use daily? Weekly? 
  • Are there aspects of the product that you don’t use? 
  • What could be added or adjusted in the product a better experience for you to use?
  • On a scale of 1 to 10 how satisfied are you with Customer Service?
  • On a scale of 1 to 10 how satisfied are you with the overall product? 
  • How likely are you to purchase another product from us? 
Person filling out NPS Survey

CSAT Best Practices

Asking the right questions are important to getting good CSAT insights!

Even though CSAT Scoring is based off of one question, making sure you ask the right questions about how satisfied they are with the product and could lead to Root Cause Analysis possibilities. Here are 5 great tricks to writing insightful CSAT Survey Questions:

  1. Keep is short and sweet! The best survey questions are ones that get the point across quickly. Long form questions and answers have a higher abandonment rate than short form questions.
  2. Only ask questions that achieve your goal. Asking unrelated questions will get the customer out of focus and may not have good quality response rates. 
  3. Make rating scales consistent. It is easy enough for your team to size up or size down data as need but if every scale you use is a 10 point scale and suddenly you drop down to a 5 point scale, customers won’t be able to give consistent answers. 
  4. Avoid leaving questions. Every company wants positive feedback, but often negative feedback is the feedback that helps us grow. If you ask questions that lead customers you won’t get honest feedback. 
  5. Make use of yes/ no questions. They are often overlooked as questions but they are easy for customers to answer and when phrased correctly can offer valuable feedback. If you are unsure if you are going to get enough feedback to make decisions, then you can create conditional formatting where if a customer answers “Yes” it takes them to answer set A of further questions and if they answer “No” it takes them to answer set B of further questions. That way you know you are getting relevant feedback from the survey. 
Customer Experience Stats

CSAT and other CX Terms

CSAT doesn’t stand on its own, it works with other CX tactics to create a customer forward brand.

CSAT and NPS: Customer Satisfaction and Net Promoter Score are both important KPI’s for customer service! They work together to determine what customers think of your product or service and how likely they are to recommend your product to a friend. A great way to determine how satisfied your customers are with your product/ service it is helpful to know how likely a respondent is to recommend your product or brand. 

CSAT and Customer Experience: CSAT and Customer Experience are directly related. If customers have a great overall experience with your brand, then they are likely to rate that they are very satisfied with your product or service. 

CSAT and Customer Effort Score: Customer Satisfaction and Customer Effort Score work well together as metrics used to measure overall customer experience. Customer Satisfaction is all about finding out how satisfied customers are with your business and Customer Effort Score measures how quickly your business responds to customer inquiries. A great way to ensure customers are happy with your business is by ensuring that a company has great customer service. 

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