Customer Satisfaction Score

What is Customer Satisfaction Score?

Customer Satisfaction Score, commonly known as CSAT Score, is a business metric used by
companies to gauge customer satisfaction after a certain interaction or on the overall
experience of the customer.

It is a strong indicator of customer retention and product repurchase. It helps you understand
customers’ needs, identify their sentiments with your products or brand, and segment them
based on their expectations with you.

The collected responses help you evaluate why a customer likes your product, why do they
prefer you over your competitors, and what are experiences that you should reinforce to
encourage customer loyalty and retention.

Satisfaction scores are key performance indicators that measure a customer's satisfaction with
a company's products or services. You can deploy customer surveys at any point along your
customer’s journey to gain insight into how happy they are with your brand.

The score is obtained by asking a simple question to measure a client's satisfaction with a
service, product, transaction or interaction. The customer chooses from a range of options,
such as:

 A numerical score from one to three, one to five or one to 10.

 Verbal indicators such as very unsatisfied, unsatisfied, neutral, satisfied and very satisfied.
 International symbols such as smiley faces or stars.
 Whether you use numbers, words or symbols, the scoring process is the same.

How to calculate Customer Satisfaction Score?

CSAT scores are easy to calculate. All you have to do is add the positive responses together,
divide them by the total number of responses and times one hundred. The final figure
represents the percentage of customers who are satisfied with their brand experience.

Most people agree that four out of five and five out of five stars represents a positive outcome.
Say 50 customers rate your company a five and 30 give a rating of four, the total number is 80
positive responses.

If 100 people took the survey, you'd divide the total number of positive responses by the total
number of customers surveyed, giving you 0.8. Multiply this by 100 to get a final percentage of
satisfied customers vs unsatisfied customers. In this case it's 80%, which is a great score.

OR
A CSAT score is easy to calculate. It’s the sum of all positive responses, divided by the total
responses collected, then multiplied by 100. The outcome leaves you with the overall
percentage of satisfied customers at your business.

For example, if you received 25 total responses and 15 of them were positive — your CSAT
score would be 60% (15 positive responses / 25 total responses = .60 x 100 = 60%).

This indicates that a majority of people are satisfied with your offering, but also highlights that
there’s much more room for improvement.

Customer Satisfaction Score Pros & Cons

CSAT Pros

 It’s short, intuitive, and simple to use.

 The rating scale can vary based on the context, giving you the flexibility to use what
works best for your audience from stars, emojis, or numeric rating scales.
 CSAT generates higher response rates than other satisfaction surveys because there
are fewer questions.

CSAT Cons

 There’s a potential for cultural bias: An article in Psychological Science showed that
people in individualistic countries choose the more extreme sides more frequently
than those in collectivistic countries (for instance, an American is more likely to rate
service as "amazing" or "terrible" than someone from Japan, who will stick to "fine" or
"not satisfactory.")
 "Satisfaction" is a subjective word, and "satisfied" may mean different things to
different people.
 There’s some ambiguity in what a good or a bad score is because of wide-ranging
benchmark data across industries and companies.

CSAT Example

To get a better understanding of a typical Customer Satisfaction Score survey, let’s use an
example. Think about the type of information a property management company would like to
know after a resident request a maintenance order.
In this example, the scale is from “Poor” to “Excellent”. This may look simple, but the
responses collected can mean different things according to the most prevalent components.