How to Calculate CSAT Effectively to Enhance Customer Satisfaction

Effectively calculate your CSAT Score to unveil insights about satisfied and dissatisfied customers. Learn how you can use this information to implement data-driven initiatives aimed at enhancing overall customer satisfaction.

Many companies believe that customer loyalty is simply a result of a good product or service.

But often, they overlook the importance of understanding the level of satisfaction customers have with their product, service, or customer support interactions.

This leads to low customer satisfaction levels, resulting in a high customer churn rate, revenue, bad brand image, and reputation.

Zendesk’s recent Customer Experience Trends Report shows that high customer satisfaction contributes to:

  • Improved customer loyalty and retention

  • Higher customer lifetime value

  • Increased business success

  • Stronger brand reputation

  • Improved customer acquisition

But how do you understand your customer satisfaction levels? By conducting customer satisfaction surveys and measuring your customer satisfaction average score.

This guide will teach you how to calculate CSAT, why you should measure customer satisfaction, and when to do it.

Let’s get started.


What is CSAT?

CSAT is short-form for Customer Satisfaction Score. It’s one of the key customer experience metrics for determining how happy or satisfied/dissatisfied your customers are with your brand, product, or service.

The main goal of CSAT is to provide brands with practical insights for improving the customer experience and overall customer relationship management efforts for better business growth.


How to Measure CSAT?

To measure CSAT, you’ll first need to collect user feedback/responses.

This involves running CSAT surveys whether in-app, through SMS, or other methods with a question like “On a scale of 1 to 5, how satisfied were you with our product during the free trial?”

The results of the surveys will help you to understand how satisfied your customers are(or not) with your product or service.

You can add multiple relevant open-ended to gather more feedback or opinions from users but, this is optional.

Customers who purchased, used your product, or interacted with your customer support can then indicate their satisfaction/dissatisfaction levels on a 1-5 scale as follows:

5-Extremely satisfied

4-Satisfied

3-Somehow satisfied

2-Dissatisfied

1-Extremely dissatisfied.

You can use a 1-3, 1-5, or 1-7 scale depending on your survey goals.

To gather useful feedback, you can use CSAT survey software like 1Flow to conduct in-app surveys with the most relevant question type in just a few clicks.

The tool is powered by AI and doesn’t require any technical or coding skills to launch your surveys.

Plus it enables you to customize survey questions to match your exact needs and brand expectations.

Here’s an example of a CSAT survey by 1Flow:


Tips to Measure CSAT Effectively

Here are the best practices for collecting customer feedback and measuring CSAT effectively:

  1. Establish Your Survey Goals

Without clear goals, the data you obtain from your survey won’t help you improve your product or service.

Start by determining why you want to measure CSAT and why you need to do it at that time. Your survey goals should be aligned with overall business goals.

  1. Find Good Survey Software

To design and deploy effective CSAT surveys, you need a good survey tool that will enable you to effortlessly send surveys without a hassle.

The survey platform should enable you to effortlessly design simple surveys that are easy for customers to respond to, enabling you to collect sufficient feedback.

Specifically, we recommend choosing a no-code survey platform that doesn’t require any technical or coding skills to design and distribute surveys.

  1. Decide The Type of Surveys to Use

To calculate CSAT, you need to seek feedback from your customers to know their level of satisfaction with your brand or product.

To achieve this, you need to choose from the following forms of customer surveys. You can also decide to go with both if your tool allows you to.

  • In-app surveys: In-app surveys enable you to seek feedback from your customers while they interact with your website or app. They involve one or two questions asking customers how satisfied or dissatisfied they are with your products or services. This form of survey is proven to generate a high response rate due to its simplicity and less time-consuming for customers to respond to.

  • Post-interaction survey: This type of survey is launched immediately after customer support interaction to help you determine how effective your customer service is when addressing customer issues.

  • Email surveys: These forms of survey are deployed via email to collect in-depth customer satisfaction feedback. Email surveys give customers ample time to respond to questions.

Measure NPS (Net Promoter Score)

To gauge customer satisfaction, you also need to measure loyalty. Measuring NPS (Net Promoter Score) enables you to know the likelihood for your customers to recommend your brand or product to others.

Measure CES (Customer Effort Score)

Measuring CES helps you understand how easy or difficult it is for customers to use your product, interact with your support, or complete a transaction with you.


How to Calculate CSAT Correctly

To get the percentage of customers who are satisfied with your product or service, you’ll need to sum up the positive responses (the total number of customers who responded with Very Satisfied and Satisfied).

You’ll then divide the figure you get by the total number of responses you received from the survey, and multiply what you get by 100.

Here’s the CSAT formula:

CSAT= Total satisfied/Total responses × 100

Thus, if your total responses from a survey were 200 and 100 said they were satisfied, then you have a 50% customer satisfaction score.

Remember the score you get will depend on the survey scale you use. Plus the CSAT calculation formula only takes into account the satisfied responses.


Why Measure Customer Satisfaction?

An unsatisfied customer is a lost customer and revenue.
According to the 2022 Zendesk’s CX Trends Report, 76% of customers said they would switch to a company’s competitor due to multiple bad experiences.

By measuring customer satisfaction, companies can understand the level of satisfaction customers have with their product or service.

Ultimately, this helps them make critical decisions based on data to improve customer retention and loyalty.

Here are a few reasons why you should measure customer satisfaction regularly:
  1. Understand Your Customer Expectations

According to Salesforce’s State of The Connected Customer survey, 73% of customers said they expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations.

By collecting user feedback at different touchpoints, you can know whether your product or service is meeting their needs and expectations.

  1. Understand Customer Issues/Complaints

No matter how good your product is, customers are probably experiencing issues when using it. By analyzing customer satisfaction levels, you can uncover issues customers are facing and address them more effectively.

  1. Make Data-Driven Improvements

By analyzing customer satisfaction survey responses, brands can get data-driven customer insight that helps to improve their product or service, improving the overall customer experience.

The survey responses can also help to make company improvements. For instance, providing extra training for customer support and product teams.

  1. Address Customer Acquisition Challenges

According to Saravana Kumar, the founder & CEO of Kovai.co, regardless of your industry, customer retention is much cheaper than acquisition.

Specifically, in SaaS, it can cost four or five times more on average to acquire new customers than to retain current ones.

This makes good business sense to measure customer satisfaction and take the necessary steps to keep your current customers happy and encourage loyal users.

  1. Improve Brand Image and Reputation

Research suggests that after a positive experience with a brand, customers tell an average of nine people, and 16 people about a negative experience.

In the era of social media, it’s easy to get a poor brand reputation in case customers share their bad experiences with your product with their friends and followers.

By conducting regular CSAT surveys, you can determine and address any concerns customers have with your product.

From there you can take the required actions to reduce customer dissatisfaction, which ultimately boosts brand image and reputation.


When Do You Measure CSAT?

Now that you know how to calculate CSAT, when should you seek feedback from your customers?

Technically, there is no right or wrong time to seek feedback from customers. However, there are proven moments when measuring CSAT is ideal.

Here are the three instances when you should analyze customer satisfaction during the customer journey:

  1. During the User Onboarding and Post-Purchase Stage

Sending customer satisfaction surveys during user onboarding and post-purchase helps you gather valuable insights that can help you improve the onboarding experience.

At this stage, the user has likely determined whether your product solves their problem or not. Sending a survey can help you know what needs to be improved.

You can also send surveys to track user motivations for signing up with a question like:

  1. Before Subscription Renewal

For subscription-based products, collecting feedback about your customer’s experience with your product a few months before renewal is a great idea.
This will help you act on the feedback before the customer gets into the renewal phase.

  1. Post Customer Support or Education Interactions

The other ideal time to use a customer satisfaction score is immediately after customer support interaction or customer education touchpoints.

For instance, you could ask customers a satisfaction question after they finish reviewing a knowledge base article or after interacting with customer service to determine the effectiveness of your customer support.

Essentially, you should measure CSAT at crucial stages of the customer journey.


What's a Good CSAT Score?

For many industries, a score between 65 and 80% is considered the maximum score. Below 60% indicates a problem with your product or service. Above 80% is an excellent score.

Generally, CSAT benchmark scores vary from one industry to another.

Here is a breakdown of CSAT scores for SaaS brands based on industry benchmarks:

CSAT Score (Meaning)

  • Above 80%: Excellent score. Your customers are satisfied with their experience with your product or service.

  • Between 60% - 80%: A good score. A good number of your customers are satisfied but there are certain areas of improvement

  • Between 40% - 60%: A decent score but you should collect customer feedback to improve your product or service

  • From 0% - 40%: A bad score. The majority of your customers are unsatisfied with their experience. Conduct multiple surveys to find out why customers are unhappy with your product or service and make improvements strategically. Evaluate customer churn rate as well.

If after calculating CSAT regularly, your scores keep on increasing, the majority of your customers are happy with your product or service. The opposite is also true.


What are the Advantages and Disadvantages of CSAT?

CSAT, like other customer experience metrics, has advantages and disadvantages including:

Advantages
  • It’s a flexible metric: You can customize the survey questions as well as the rating system to match your audience and make it relevant to the context.

  • It’s quick and easy to calculate: Calculating CSAT is straightforward. Get the total positive responses, divide the figure you get by the total responses from the survey then multiply what you get with 100.

  • Good response rate: CSAT surveys feature a single question, increasing the chances of getting a higher response rate.

  • Simple to customers: CSAT features a single survey question making it simple for customers to give a response.

  • Easy to analyze: The CSAT score is usually in the form of numerical data, making it easy to interpret

Disadvantages
  • Might not indicate overall customer experience: When responding to a CSAT survey question, customers may provide positive or negative feedback based on how they feel at that moment. Or their satisfaction could be based on a single factor of your product or service.

  • Might not indicate customer loyalty: A high CSAT score indicates customers are happy with their experience but might not mean they are likely to become repeat customers.

  • Might provide biased results: Sometimes customers may not provide an honest opinion or feedback about their experience.

  • Not comprehensive: The survey aims at establishing how satisfied customers are with your product hence might not uncover customer experiences in detail.

  • Only uncovers individual experiences: Customers respond based on their individual experiences, which means they cannot respond on behalf of a team or their company.


What’s the Difference between CSAT, NPS, and CES?

Customer Satisfaction Score, Net Promoter Score, and Customer Effort Score are three key customer satisfaction metrics to track frequently to offer the best experience to your customers at all times.

However, the three metrics track different aspects of the customer experience.

CSAT is a powerful metric that indicates how satisfied customers are with your product or service. It is measured after asking customers a simple survey question like this:

Sending CSAT surveys helps to determine how happy/unhappy customers are with your product, customer support, or a decision your company made.

NPS (Net Promoter Score) measures how loyal a customer is and their likelihood to recommend your product or service to other users based on a simple survey question like this.

The idea of NPS is to gauge customer loyalty and satisfaction with your product or service as well as their likelihood to spread the word about your brand. It's an accurate predictor of customer loyalty.

On the other hand, CES (Customer Effort Score) measures how easy or difficult it is for a customer to use your product, interact with your brand or service, or complete a transaction.

In other words, it focuses on determining the effort a customer makes when using your product or service, often using a specialized customer experience program.

 

CSAT Usage Guide

Uncovering satisfied customers isn’t enough. You need to go a step further to determine what makes them satisfied or dissatisfied.

If a majority of customers are unhappy, you need to know why and come up with a strategy to convert them into happy customers.

For this, you need to consider both quantitative and qualitative feedback gained from the survey. Additionally, you should measure CSAT alongside NPS and CES to get a comprehensive view of the customer experience your company offers to customers.


Measuring CSAT in Open-Ended Responses

CSAT shows you the percentage of customers who expressed their satisfaction with your product or service.

This quantitative data doesn’t provide actionable insights into why your customers are satisfied or dissatisfied.

You need to gather qualitative insights by including open-ended questions in your survey to allow customers to provide open-ended responses. This will help you understand customer sentiment, their feelings,  and ideas that can help you improve their experience.

For instance, in your CSAT survey, you can have a question like, “On a scale of 1 to 7 how was your experience when interacting with our customer service?”

You can then include an open-ended question: “Please describe any issue you encountered. This will help us improve the experience”

From this survey, you will gain both quantitative and qualitative insights that will help you uncover the experience customers had with your company and why.

With 1Flow survey templates, you can launch CSAT surveys and customize your questions to match the results you want to obtain.

Linking CSAT to Customer Experience and Increased Revenue

Great customer experience can encourage your customers to become loyal to your company, recommend you to others, and even spend more on your product. It can also increase the Customer Lifetime Value and expand your customer base.

According to SuperOffice statistics, 86% of customers say they will spend more after a great experience. Tracking CSAT can help you invest in CX initiatives aimed at boosting overall customer experience, which can ultimately double your revenue.


1Flow: Here's How We Can Help You Collect Better CSAT Responses

Evaluating CSAT at multiple touchpoints is not only a great idea for improving customer experience but can also drive company growth and long-term success. It can also be a powerful tool for standing out from your competition.

But this can only be achieved when you use a robust CSAT survey software to collect both positive and negative feedback from your customers.

1Flow enables you to launch effective in-app surveys to collect actionable customer feedback when customers are browsing your website or interacting with your mobile app to improve overall customer satisfaction.

  • The tool’s precise targeting enables you to launch surveys targeted to the right audience at the right moment.

  • With the customizable templates, you can add your logo, fonts, colors and other branding elements to your surveys for a professional design.

  • It integrates with any mobile and web platforms to enable you to launch and measure CSAT score seamlessly.

  • 1Flow is simple and user-friendly for both beginners and experts alike. You don’t need any technical or coding knowledge to deploy CSAT surveys. Plus, you're guaranteed quick response time on your surveys.

Ready to calculate your CSAT score and keep your customers satisfied ?

Sign up for 1Flow today! 14-day unlimited use free trial included.



Many companies believe that customer loyalty is simply a result of a good product or service.

But often, they overlook the importance of understanding the level of satisfaction customers have with their product, service, or customer support interactions.

This leads to low customer satisfaction levels, resulting in a high customer churn rate, revenue, bad brand image, and reputation.

Zendesk’s recent Customer Experience Trends Report shows that high customer satisfaction contributes to:

  • Improved customer loyalty and retention

  • Higher customer lifetime value

  • Increased business success

  • Stronger brand reputation

  • Improved customer acquisition

But how do you understand your customer satisfaction levels? By conducting customer satisfaction surveys and measuring your customer satisfaction average score.

This guide will teach you how to calculate CSAT, why you should measure customer satisfaction, and when to do it.

Let’s get started.


What is CSAT?

CSAT is short-form for Customer Satisfaction Score. It’s one of the key customer experience metrics for determining how happy or satisfied/dissatisfied your customers are with your brand, product, or service.

The main goal of CSAT is to provide brands with practical insights for improving the customer experience and overall customer relationship management efforts for better business growth.


How to Measure CSAT?

To measure CSAT, you’ll first need to collect user feedback/responses.

This involves running CSAT surveys whether in-app, through SMS, or other methods with a question like “On a scale of 1 to 5, how satisfied were you with our product during the free trial?”

The results of the surveys will help you to understand how satisfied your customers are(or not) with your product or service.

You can add multiple relevant open-ended to gather more feedback or opinions from users but, this is optional.

Customers who purchased, used your product, or interacted with your customer support can then indicate their satisfaction/dissatisfaction levels on a 1-5 scale as follows:

5-Extremely satisfied

4-Satisfied

3-Somehow satisfied

2-Dissatisfied

1-Extremely dissatisfied.

You can use a 1-3, 1-5, or 1-7 scale depending on your survey goals.

To gather useful feedback, you can use CSAT survey software like 1Flow to conduct in-app surveys with the most relevant question type in just a few clicks.

The tool is powered by AI and doesn’t require any technical or coding skills to launch your surveys.

Plus it enables you to customize survey questions to match your exact needs and brand expectations.

Here’s an example of a CSAT survey by 1Flow:


Tips to Measure CSAT Effectively

Here are the best practices for collecting customer feedback and measuring CSAT effectively:

  1. Establish Your Survey Goals

Without clear goals, the data you obtain from your survey won’t help you improve your product or service.

Start by determining why you want to measure CSAT and why you need to do it at that time. Your survey goals should be aligned with overall business goals.

  1. Find Good Survey Software

To design and deploy effective CSAT surveys, you need a good survey tool that will enable you to effortlessly send surveys without a hassle.

The survey platform should enable you to effortlessly design simple surveys that are easy for customers to respond to, enabling you to collect sufficient feedback.

Specifically, we recommend choosing a no-code survey platform that doesn’t require any technical or coding skills to design and distribute surveys.

  1. Decide The Type of Surveys to Use

To calculate CSAT, you need to seek feedback from your customers to know their level of satisfaction with your brand or product.

To achieve this, you need to choose from the following forms of customer surveys. You can also decide to go with both if your tool allows you to.

  • In-app surveys: In-app surveys enable you to seek feedback from your customers while they interact with your website or app. They involve one or two questions asking customers how satisfied or dissatisfied they are with your products or services. This form of survey is proven to generate a high response rate due to its simplicity and less time-consuming for customers to respond to.

  • Post-interaction survey: This type of survey is launched immediately after customer support interaction to help you determine how effective your customer service is when addressing customer issues.

  • Email surveys: These forms of survey are deployed via email to collect in-depth customer satisfaction feedback. Email surveys give customers ample time to respond to questions.

Measure NPS (Net Promoter Score)

To gauge customer satisfaction, you also need to measure loyalty. Measuring NPS (Net Promoter Score) enables you to know the likelihood for your customers to recommend your brand or product to others.

Measure CES (Customer Effort Score)

Measuring CES helps you understand how easy or difficult it is for customers to use your product, interact with your support, or complete a transaction with you.


How to Calculate CSAT Correctly

To get the percentage of customers who are satisfied with your product or service, you’ll need to sum up the positive responses (the total number of customers who responded with Very Satisfied and Satisfied).

You’ll then divide the figure you get by the total number of responses you received from the survey, and multiply what you get by 100.

Here’s the CSAT formula:

CSAT= Total satisfied/Total responses × 100

Thus, if your total responses from a survey were 200 and 100 said they were satisfied, then you have a 50% customer satisfaction score.

Remember the score you get will depend on the survey scale you use. Plus the CSAT calculation formula only takes into account the satisfied responses.


Why Measure Customer Satisfaction?

An unsatisfied customer is a lost customer and revenue.
According to the 2022 Zendesk’s CX Trends Report, 76% of customers said they would switch to a company’s competitor due to multiple bad experiences.

By measuring customer satisfaction, companies can understand the level of satisfaction customers have with their product or service.

Ultimately, this helps them make critical decisions based on data to improve customer retention and loyalty.

Here are a few reasons why you should measure customer satisfaction regularly:
  1. Understand Your Customer Expectations

According to Salesforce’s State of The Connected Customer survey, 73% of customers said they expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations.

By collecting user feedback at different touchpoints, you can know whether your product or service is meeting their needs and expectations.

  1. Understand Customer Issues/Complaints

No matter how good your product is, customers are probably experiencing issues when using it. By analyzing customer satisfaction levels, you can uncover issues customers are facing and address them more effectively.

  1. Make Data-Driven Improvements

By analyzing customer satisfaction survey responses, brands can get data-driven customer insight that helps to improve their product or service, improving the overall customer experience.

The survey responses can also help to make company improvements. For instance, providing extra training for customer support and product teams.

  1. Address Customer Acquisition Challenges

According to Saravana Kumar, the founder & CEO of Kovai.co, regardless of your industry, customer retention is much cheaper than acquisition.

Specifically, in SaaS, it can cost four or five times more on average to acquire new customers than to retain current ones.

This makes good business sense to measure customer satisfaction and take the necessary steps to keep your current customers happy and encourage loyal users.

  1. Improve Brand Image and Reputation

Research suggests that after a positive experience with a brand, customers tell an average of nine people, and 16 people about a negative experience.

In the era of social media, it’s easy to get a poor brand reputation in case customers share their bad experiences with your product with their friends and followers.

By conducting regular CSAT surveys, you can determine and address any concerns customers have with your product.

From there you can take the required actions to reduce customer dissatisfaction, which ultimately boosts brand image and reputation.


When Do You Measure CSAT?

Now that you know how to calculate CSAT, when should you seek feedback from your customers?

Technically, there is no right or wrong time to seek feedback from customers. However, there are proven moments when measuring CSAT is ideal.

Here are the three instances when you should analyze customer satisfaction during the customer journey:

  1. During the User Onboarding and Post-Purchase Stage

Sending customer satisfaction surveys during user onboarding and post-purchase helps you gather valuable insights that can help you improve the onboarding experience.

At this stage, the user has likely determined whether your product solves their problem or not. Sending a survey can help you know what needs to be improved.

You can also send surveys to track user motivations for signing up with a question like:

  1. Before Subscription Renewal

For subscription-based products, collecting feedback about your customer’s experience with your product a few months before renewal is a great idea.
This will help you act on the feedback before the customer gets into the renewal phase.

  1. Post Customer Support or Education Interactions

The other ideal time to use a customer satisfaction score is immediately after customer support interaction or customer education touchpoints.

For instance, you could ask customers a satisfaction question after they finish reviewing a knowledge base article or after interacting with customer service to determine the effectiveness of your customer support.

Essentially, you should measure CSAT at crucial stages of the customer journey.


What's a Good CSAT Score?

For many industries, a score between 65 and 80% is considered the maximum score. Below 60% indicates a problem with your product or service. Above 80% is an excellent score.

Generally, CSAT benchmark scores vary from one industry to another.

Here is a breakdown of CSAT scores for SaaS brands based on industry benchmarks:

CSAT Score (Meaning)

  • Above 80%: Excellent score. Your customers are satisfied with their experience with your product or service.

  • Between 60% - 80%: A good score. A good number of your customers are satisfied but there are certain areas of improvement

  • Between 40% - 60%: A decent score but you should collect customer feedback to improve your product or service

  • From 0% - 40%: A bad score. The majority of your customers are unsatisfied with their experience. Conduct multiple surveys to find out why customers are unhappy with your product or service and make improvements strategically. Evaluate customer churn rate as well.

If after calculating CSAT regularly, your scores keep on increasing, the majority of your customers are happy with your product or service. The opposite is also true.


What are the Advantages and Disadvantages of CSAT?

CSAT, like other customer experience metrics, has advantages and disadvantages including:

Advantages
  • It’s a flexible metric: You can customize the survey questions as well as the rating system to match your audience and make it relevant to the context.

  • It’s quick and easy to calculate: Calculating CSAT is straightforward. Get the total positive responses, divide the figure you get by the total responses from the survey then multiply what you get with 100.

  • Good response rate: CSAT surveys feature a single question, increasing the chances of getting a higher response rate.

  • Simple to customers: CSAT features a single survey question making it simple for customers to give a response.

  • Easy to analyze: The CSAT score is usually in the form of numerical data, making it easy to interpret

Disadvantages
  • Might not indicate overall customer experience: When responding to a CSAT survey question, customers may provide positive or negative feedback based on how they feel at that moment. Or their satisfaction could be based on a single factor of your product or service.

  • Might not indicate customer loyalty: A high CSAT score indicates customers are happy with their experience but might not mean they are likely to become repeat customers.

  • Might provide biased results: Sometimes customers may not provide an honest opinion or feedback about their experience.

  • Not comprehensive: The survey aims at establishing how satisfied customers are with your product hence might not uncover customer experiences in detail.

  • Only uncovers individual experiences: Customers respond based on their individual experiences, which means they cannot respond on behalf of a team or their company.


What’s the Difference between CSAT, NPS, and CES?

Customer Satisfaction Score, Net Promoter Score, and Customer Effort Score are three key customer satisfaction metrics to track frequently to offer the best experience to your customers at all times.

However, the three metrics track different aspects of the customer experience.

CSAT is a powerful metric that indicates how satisfied customers are with your product or service. It is measured after asking customers a simple survey question like this:

Sending CSAT surveys helps to determine how happy/unhappy customers are with your product, customer support, or a decision your company made.

NPS (Net Promoter Score) measures how loyal a customer is and their likelihood to recommend your product or service to other users based on a simple survey question like this.

The idea of NPS is to gauge customer loyalty and satisfaction with your product or service as well as their likelihood to spread the word about your brand. It's an accurate predictor of customer loyalty.

On the other hand, CES (Customer Effort Score) measures how easy or difficult it is for a customer to use your product, interact with your brand or service, or complete a transaction.

In other words, it focuses on determining the effort a customer makes when using your product or service, often using a specialized customer experience program.

 

CSAT Usage Guide

Uncovering satisfied customers isn’t enough. You need to go a step further to determine what makes them satisfied or dissatisfied.

If a majority of customers are unhappy, you need to know why and come up with a strategy to convert them into happy customers.

For this, you need to consider both quantitative and qualitative feedback gained from the survey. Additionally, you should measure CSAT alongside NPS and CES to get a comprehensive view of the customer experience your company offers to customers.


Measuring CSAT in Open-Ended Responses

CSAT shows you the percentage of customers who expressed their satisfaction with your product or service.

This quantitative data doesn’t provide actionable insights into why your customers are satisfied or dissatisfied.

You need to gather qualitative insights by including open-ended questions in your survey to allow customers to provide open-ended responses. This will help you understand customer sentiment, their feelings,  and ideas that can help you improve their experience.

For instance, in your CSAT survey, you can have a question like, “On a scale of 1 to 7 how was your experience when interacting with our customer service?”

You can then include an open-ended question: “Please describe any issue you encountered. This will help us improve the experience”

From this survey, you will gain both quantitative and qualitative insights that will help you uncover the experience customers had with your company and why.

With 1Flow survey templates, you can launch CSAT surveys and customize your questions to match the results you want to obtain.

Linking CSAT to Customer Experience and Increased Revenue

Great customer experience can encourage your customers to become loyal to your company, recommend you to others, and even spend more on your product. It can also increase the Customer Lifetime Value and expand your customer base.

According to SuperOffice statistics, 86% of customers say they will spend more after a great experience. Tracking CSAT can help you invest in CX initiatives aimed at boosting overall customer experience, which can ultimately double your revenue.


1Flow: Here's How We Can Help You Collect Better CSAT Responses

Evaluating CSAT at multiple touchpoints is not only a great idea for improving customer experience but can also drive company growth and long-term success. It can also be a powerful tool for standing out from your competition.

But this can only be achieved when you use a robust CSAT survey software to collect both positive and negative feedback from your customers.

1Flow enables you to launch effective in-app surveys to collect actionable customer feedback when customers are browsing your website or interacting with your mobile app to improve overall customer satisfaction.

  • The tool’s precise targeting enables you to launch surveys targeted to the right audience at the right moment.

  • With the customizable templates, you can add your logo, fonts, colors and other branding elements to your surveys for a professional design.

  • It integrates with any mobile and web platforms to enable you to launch and measure CSAT score seamlessly.

  • 1Flow is simple and user-friendly for both beginners and experts alike. You don’t need any technical or coding knowledge to deploy CSAT surveys. Plus, you're guaranteed quick response time on your surveys.

Ready to calculate your CSAT score and keep your customers satisfied ?

Sign up for 1Flow today! 14-day unlimited use free trial included.



Many companies believe that customer loyalty is simply a result of a good product or service.

But often, they overlook the importance of understanding the level of satisfaction customers have with their product, service, or customer support interactions.

This leads to low customer satisfaction levels, resulting in a high customer churn rate, revenue, bad brand image, and reputation.

Zendesk’s recent Customer Experience Trends Report shows that high customer satisfaction contributes to:

  • Improved customer loyalty and retention

  • Higher customer lifetime value

  • Increased business success

  • Stronger brand reputation

  • Improved customer acquisition

But how do you understand your customer satisfaction levels? By conducting customer satisfaction surveys and measuring your customer satisfaction average score.

This guide will teach you how to calculate CSAT, why you should measure customer satisfaction, and when to do it.

Let’s get started.


What is CSAT?

CSAT is short-form for Customer Satisfaction Score. It’s one of the key customer experience metrics for determining how happy or satisfied/dissatisfied your customers are with your brand, product, or service.

The main goal of CSAT is to provide brands with practical insights for improving the customer experience and overall customer relationship management efforts for better business growth.


How to Measure CSAT?

To measure CSAT, you’ll first need to collect user feedback/responses.

This involves running CSAT surveys whether in-app, through SMS, or other methods with a question like “On a scale of 1 to 5, how satisfied were you with our product during the free trial?”

The results of the surveys will help you to understand how satisfied your customers are(or not) with your product or service.

You can add multiple relevant open-ended to gather more feedback or opinions from users but, this is optional.

Customers who purchased, used your product, or interacted with your customer support can then indicate their satisfaction/dissatisfaction levels on a 1-5 scale as follows:

5-Extremely satisfied

4-Satisfied

3-Somehow satisfied

2-Dissatisfied

1-Extremely dissatisfied.

You can use a 1-3, 1-5, or 1-7 scale depending on your survey goals.

To gather useful feedback, you can use CSAT survey software like 1Flow to conduct in-app surveys with the most relevant question type in just a few clicks.

The tool is powered by AI and doesn’t require any technical or coding skills to launch your surveys.

Plus it enables you to customize survey questions to match your exact needs and brand expectations.

Here’s an example of a CSAT survey by 1Flow:


Tips to Measure CSAT Effectively

Here are the best practices for collecting customer feedback and measuring CSAT effectively:

  1. Establish Your Survey Goals

Without clear goals, the data you obtain from your survey won’t help you improve your product or service.

Start by determining why you want to measure CSAT and why you need to do it at that time. Your survey goals should be aligned with overall business goals.

  1. Find Good Survey Software

To design and deploy effective CSAT surveys, you need a good survey tool that will enable you to effortlessly send surveys without a hassle.

The survey platform should enable you to effortlessly design simple surveys that are easy for customers to respond to, enabling you to collect sufficient feedback.

Specifically, we recommend choosing a no-code survey platform that doesn’t require any technical or coding skills to design and distribute surveys.

  1. Decide The Type of Surveys to Use

To calculate CSAT, you need to seek feedback from your customers to know their level of satisfaction with your brand or product.

To achieve this, you need to choose from the following forms of customer surveys. You can also decide to go with both if your tool allows you to.

  • In-app surveys: In-app surveys enable you to seek feedback from your customers while they interact with your website or app. They involve one or two questions asking customers how satisfied or dissatisfied they are with your products or services. This form of survey is proven to generate a high response rate due to its simplicity and less time-consuming for customers to respond to.

  • Post-interaction survey: This type of survey is launched immediately after customer support interaction to help you determine how effective your customer service is when addressing customer issues.

  • Email surveys: These forms of survey are deployed via email to collect in-depth customer satisfaction feedback. Email surveys give customers ample time to respond to questions.

Measure NPS (Net Promoter Score)

To gauge customer satisfaction, you also need to measure loyalty. Measuring NPS (Net Promoter Score) enables you to know the likelihood for your customers to recommend your brand or product to others.

Measure CES (Customer Effort Score)

Measuring CES helps you understand how easy or difficult it is for customers to use your product, interact with your support, or complete a transaction with you.


How to Calculate CSAT Correctly

To get the percentage of customers who are satisfied with your product or service, you’ll need to sum up the positive responses (the total number of customers who responded with Very Satisfied and Satisfied).

You’ll then divide the figure you get by the total number of responses you received from the survey, and multiply what you get by 100.

Here’s the CSAT formula:

CSAT= Total satisfied/Total responses × 100

Thus, if your total responses from a survey were 200 and 100 said they were satisfied, then you have a 50% customer satisfaction score.

Remember the score you get will depend on the survey scale you use. Plus the CSAT calculation formula only takes into account the satisfied responses.


Why Measure Customer Satisfaction?

An unsatisfied customer is a lost customer and revenue.
According to the 2022 Zendesk’s CX Trends Report, 76% of customers said they would switch to a company’s competitor due to multiple bad experiences.

By measuring customer satisfaction, companies can understand the level of satisfaction customers have with their product or service.

Ultimately, this helps them make critical decisions based on data to improve customer retention and loyalty.

Here are a few reasons why you should measure customer satisfaction regularly:
  1. Understand Your Customer Expectations

According to Salesforce’s State of The Connected Customer survey, 73% of customers said they expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations.

By collecting user feedback at different touchpoints, you can know whether your product or service is meeting their needs and expectations.

  1. Understand Customer Issues/Complaints

No matter how good your product is, customers are probably experiencing issues when using it. By analyzing customer satisfaction levels, you can uncover issues customers are facing and address them more effectively.

  1. Make Data-Driven Improvements

By analyzing customer satisfaction survey responses, brands can get data-driven customer insight that helps to improve their product or service, improving the overall customer experience.

The survey responses can also help to make company improvements. For instance, providing extra training for customer support and product teams.

  1. Address Customer Acquisition Challenges

According to Saravana Kumar, the founder & CEO of Kovai.co, regardless of your industry, customer retention is much cheaper than acquisition.

Specifically, in SaaS, it can cost four or five times more on average to acquire new customers than to retain current ones.

This makes good business sense to measure customer satisfaction and take the necessary steps to keep your current customers happy and encourage loyal users.

  1. Improve Brand Image and Reputation

Research suggests that after a positive experience with a brand, customers tell an average of nine people, and 16 people about a negative experience.

In the era of social media, it’s easy to get a poor brand reputation in case customers share their bad experiences with your product with their friends and followers.

By conducting regular CSAT surveys, you can determine and address any concerns customers have with your product.

From there you can take the required actions to reduce customer dissatisfaction, which ultimately boosts brand image and reputation.


When Do You Measure CSAT?

Now that you know how to calculate CSAT, when should you seek feedback from your customers?

Technically, there is no right or wrong time to seek feedback from customers. However, there are proven moments when measuring CSAT is ideal.

Here are the three instances when you should analyze customer satisfaction during the customer journey:

  1. During the User Onboarding and Post-Purchase Stage

Sending customer satisfaction surveys during user onboarding and post-purchase helps you gather valuable insights that can help you improve the onboarding experience.

At this stage, the user has likely determined whether your product solves their problem or not. Sending a survey can help you know what needs to be improved.

You can also send surveys to track user motivations for signing up with a question like:

  1. Before Subscription Renewal

For subscription-based products, collecting feedback about your customer’s experience with your product a few months before renewal is a great idea.
This will help you act on the feedback before the customer gets into the renewal phase.

  1. Post Customer Support or Education Interactions

The other ideal time to use a customer satisfaction score is immediately after customer support interaction or customer education touchpoints.

For instance, you could ask customers a satisfaction question after they finish reviewing a knowledge base article or after interacting with customer service to determine the effectiveness of your customer support.

Essentially, you should measure CSAT at crucial stages of the customer journey.


What's a Good CSAT Score?

For many industries, a score between 65 and 80% is considered the maximum score. Below 60% indicates a problem with your product or service. Above 80% is an excellent score.

Generally, CSAT benchmark scores vary from one industry to another.

Here is a breakdown of CSAT scores for SaaS brands based on industry benchmarks:

CSAT Score (Meaning)

  • Above 80%: Excellent score. Your customers are satisfied with their experience with your product or service.

  • Between 60% - 80%: A good score. A good number of your customers are satisfied but there are certain areas of improvement

  • Between 40% - 60%: A decent score but you should collect customer feedback to improve your product or service

  • From 0% - 40%: A bad score. The majority of your customers are unsatisfied with their experience. Conduct multiple surveys to find out why customers are unhappy with your product or service and make improvements strategically. Evaluate customer churn rate as well.

If after calculating CSAT regularly, your scores keep on increasing, the majority of your customers are happy with your product or service. The opposite is also true.


What are the Advantages and Disadvantages of CSAT?

CSAT, like other customer experience metrics, has advantages and disadvantages including:

Advantages
  • It’s a flexible metric: You can customize the survey questions as well as the rating system to match your audience and make it relevant to the context.

  • It’s quick and easy to calculate: Calculating CSAT is straightforward. Get the total positive responses, divide the figure you get by the total responses from the survey then multiply what you get with 100.

  • Good response rate: CSAT surveys feature a single question, increasing the chances of getting a higher response rate.

  • Simple to customers: CSAT features a single survey question making it simple for customers to give a response.

  • Easy to analyze: The CSAT score is usually in the form of numerical data, making it easy to interpret

Disadvantages
  • Might not indicate overall customer experience: When responding to a CSAT survey question, customers may provide positive or negative feedback based on how they feel at that moment. Or their satisfaction could be based on a single factor of your product or service.

  • Might not indicate customer loyalty: A high CSAT score indicates customers are happy with their experience but might not mean they are likely to become repeat customers.

  • Might provide biased results: Sometimes customers may not provide an honest opinion or feedback about their experience.

  • Not comprehensive: The survey aims at establishing how satisfied customers are with your product hence might not uncover customer experiences in detail.

  • Only uncovers individual experiences: Customers respond based on their individual experiences, which means they cannot respond on behalf of a team or their company.


What’s the Difference between CSAT, NPS, and CES?

Customer Satisfaction Score, Net Promoter Score, and Customer Effort Score are three key customer satisfaction metrics to track frequently to offer the best experience to your customers at all times.

However, the three metrics track different aspects of the customer experience.

CSAT is a powerful metric that indicates how satisfied customers are with your product or service. It is measured after asking customers a simple survey question like this:

Sending CSAT surveys helps to determine how happy/unhappy customers are with your product, customer support, or a decision your company made.

NPS (Net Promoter Score) measures how loyal a customer is and their likelihood to recommend your product or service to other users based on a simple survey question like this.

The idea of NPS is to gauge customer loyalty and satisfaction with your product or service as well as their likelihood to spread the word about your brand. It's an accurate predictor of customer loyalty.

On the other hand, CES (Customer Effort Score) measures how easy or difficult it is for a customer to use your product, interact with your brand or service, or complete a transaction.

In other words, it focuses on determining the effort a customer makes when using your product or service, often using a specialized customer experience program.

 

CSAT Usage Guide

Uncovering satisfied customers isn’t enough. You need to go a step further to determine what makes them satisfied or dissatisfied.

If a majority of customers are unhappy, you need to know why and come up with a strategy to convert them into happy customers.

For this, you need to consider both quantitative and qualitative feedback gained from the survey. Additionally, you should measure CSAT alongside NPS and CES to get a comprehensive view of the customer experience your company offers to customers.


Measuring CSAT in Open-Ended Responses

CSAT shows you the percentage of customers who expressed their satisfaction with your product or service.

This quantitative data doesn’t provide actionable insights into why your customers are satisfied or dissatisfied.

You need to gather qualitative insights by including open-ended questions in your survey to allow customers to provide open-ended responses. This will help you understand customer sentiment, their feelings,  and ideas that can help you improve their experience.

For instance, in your CSAT survey, you can have a question like, “On a scale of 1 to 7 how was your experience when interacting with our customer service?”

You can then include an open-ended question: “Please describe any issue you encountered. This will help us improve the experience”

From this survey, you will gain both quantitative and qualitative insights that will help you uncover the experience customers had with your company and why.

With 1Flow survey templates, you can launch CSAT surveys and customize your questions to match the results you want to obtain.

Linking CSAT to Customer Experience and Increased Revenue

Great customer experience can encourage your customers to become loyal to your company, recommend you to others, and even spend more on your product. It can also increase the Customer Lifetime Value and expand your customer base.

According to SuperOffice statistics, 86% of customers say they will spend more after a great experience. Tracking CSAT can help you invest in CX initiatives aimed at boosting overall customer experience, which can ultimately double your revenue.


1Flow: Here's How We Can Help You Collect Better CSAT Responses

Evaluating CSAT at multiple touchpoints is not only a great idea for improving customer experience but can also drive company growth and long-term success. It can also be a powerful tool for standing out from your competition.

But this can only be achieved when you use a robust CSAT survey software to collect both positive and negative feedback from your customers.

1Flow enables you to launch effective in-app surveys to collect actionable customer feedback when customers are browsing your website or interacting with your mobile app to improve overall customer satisfaction.

  • The tool’s precise targeting enables you to launch surveys targeted to the right audience at the right moment.

  • With the customizable templates, you can add your logo, fonts, colors and other branding elements to your surveys for a professional design.

  • It integrates with any mobile and web platforms to enable you to launch and measure CSAT score seamlessly.

  • 1Flow is simple and user-friendly for both beginners and experts alike. You don’t need any technical or coding knowledge to deploy CSAT surveys. Plus, you're guaranteed quick response time on your surveys.

Ready to calculate your CSAT score and keep your customers satisfied ?

Sign up for 1Flow today! 14-day unlimited use free trial included.



Many companies believe that customer loyalty is simply a result of a good product or service.

But often, they overlook the importance of understanding the level of satisfaction customers have with their product, service, or customer support interactions.

This leads to low customer satisfaction levels, resulting in a high customer churn rate, revenue, bad brand image, and reputation.

Zendesk’s recent Customer Experience Trends Report shows that high customer satisfaction contributes to:

  • Improved customer loyalty and retention

  • Higher customer lifetime value

  • Increased business success

  • Stronger brand reputation

  • Improved customer acquisition

But how do you understand your customer satisfaction levels? By conducting customer satisfaction surveys and measuring your customer satisfaction average score.

This guide will teach you how to calculate CSAT, why you should measure customer satisfaction, and when to do it.

Let’s get started.


What is CSAT?

CSAT is short-form for Customer Satisfaction Score. It’s one of the key customer experience metrics for determining how happy or satisfied/dissatisfied your customers are with your brand, product, or service.

The main goal of CSAT is to provide brands with practical insights for improving the customer experience and overall customer relationship management efforts for better business growth.


How to Measure CSAT?

To measure CSAT, you’ll first need to collect user feedback/responses.

This involves running CSAT surveys whether in-app, through SMS, or other methods with a question like “On a scale of 1 to 5, how satisfied were you with our product during the free trial?”

The results of the surveys will help you to understand how satisfied your customers are(or not) with your product or service.

You can add multiple relevant open-ended to gather more feedback or opinions from users but, this is optional.

Customers who purchased, used your product, or interacted with your customer support can then indicate their satisfaction/dissatisfaction levels on a 1-5 scale as follows:

5-Extremely satisfied

4-Satisfied

3-Somehow satisfied

2-Dissatisfied

1-Extremely dissatisfied.

You can use a 1-3, 1-5, or 1-7 scale depending on your survey goals.

To gather useful feedback, you can use CSAT survey software like 1Flow to conduct in-app surveys with the most relevant question type in just a few clicks.

The tool is powered by AI and doesn’t require any technical or coding skills to launch your surveys.

Plus it enables you to customize survey questions to match your exact needs and brand expectations.

Here’s an example of a CSAT survey by 1Flow:


Tips to Measure CSAT Effectively

Here are the best practices for collecting customer feedback and measuring CSAT effectively:

  1. Establish Your Survey Goals

Without clear goals, the data you obtain from your survey won’t help you improve your product or service.

Start by determining why you want to measure CSAT and why you need to do it at that time. Your survey goals should be aligned with overall business goals.

  1. Find Good Survey Software

To design and deploy effective CSAT surveys, you need a good survey tool that will enable you to effortlessly send surveys without a hassle.

The survey platform should enable you to effortlessly design simple surveys that are easy for customers to respond to, enabling you to collect sufficient feedback.

Specifically, we recommend choosing a no-code survey platform that doesn’t require any technical or coding skills to design and distribute surveys.

  1. Decide The Type of Surveys to Use

To calculate CSAT, you need to seek feedback from your customers to know their level of satisfaction with your brand or product.

To achieve this, you need to choose from the following forms of customer surveys. You can also decide to go with both if your tool allows you to.

  • In-app surveys: In-app surveys enable you to seek feedback from your customers while they interact with your website or app. They involve one or two questions asking customers how satisfied or dissatisfied they are with your products or services. This form of survey is proven to generate a high response rate due to its simplicity and less time-consuming for customers to respond to.

  • Post-interaction survey: This type of survey is launched immediately after customer support interaction to help you determine how effective your customer service is when addressing customer issues.

  • Email surveys: These forms of survey are deployed via email to collect in-depth customer satisfaction feedback. Email surveys give customers ample time to respond to questions.

Measure NPS (Net Promoter Score)

To gauge customer satisfaction, you also need to measure loyalty. Measuring NPS (Net Promoter Score) enables you to know the likelihood for your customers to recommend your brand or product to others.

Measure CES (Customer Effort Score)

Measuring CES helps you understand how easy or difficult it is for customers to use your product, interact with your support, or complete a transaction with you.


How to Calculate CSAT Correctly

To get the percentage of customers who are satisfied with your product or service, you’ll need to sum up the positive responses (the total number of customers who responded with Very Satisfied and Satisfied).

You’ll then divide the figure you get by the total number of responses you received from the survey, and multiply what you get by 100.

Here’s the CSAT formula:

CSAT= Total satisfied/Total responses × 100

Thus, if your total responses from a survey were 200 and 100 said they were satisfied, then you have a 50% customer satisfaction score.

Remember the score you get will depend on the survey scale you use. Plus the CSAT calculation formula only takes into account the satisfied responses.


Why Measure Customer Satisfaction?

An unsatisfied customer is a lost customer and revenue.
According to the 2022 Zendesk’s CX Trends Report, 76% of customers said they would switch to a company’s competitor due to multiple bad experiences.

By measuring customer satisfaction, companies can understand the level of satisfaction customers have with their product or service.

Ultimately, this helps them make critical decisions based on data to improve customer retention and loyalty.

Here are a few reasons why you should measure customer satisfaction regularly:
  1. Understand Your Customer Expectations

According to Salesforce’s State of The Connected Customer survey, 73% of customers said they expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations.

By collecting user feedback at different touchpoints, you can know whether your product or service is meeting their needs and expectations.

  1. Understand Customer Issues/Complaints

No matter how good your product is, customers are probably experiencing issues when using it. By analyzing customer satisfaction levels, you can uncover issues customers are facing and address them more effectively.

  1. Make Data-Driven Improvements

By analyzing customer satisfaction survey responses, brands can get data-driven customer insight that helps to improve their product or service, improving the overall customer experience.

The survey responses can also help to make company improvements. For instance, providing extra training for customer support and product teams.

  1. Address Customer Acquisition Challenges

According to Saravana Kumar, the founder & CEO of Kovai.co, regardless of your industry, customer retention is much cheaper than acquisition.

Specifically, in SaaS, it can cost four or five times more on average to acquire new customers than to retain current ones.

This makes good business sense to measure customer satisfaction and take the necessary steps to keep your current customers happy and encourage loyal users.

  1. Improve Brand Image and Reputation

Research suggests that after a positive experience with a brand, customers tell an average of nine people, and 16 people about a negative experience.

In the era of social media, it’s easy to get a poor brand reputation in case customers share their bad experiences with your product with their friends and followers.

By conducting regular CSAT surveys, you can determine and address any concerns customers have with your product.

From there you can take the required actions to reduce customer dissatisfaction, which ultimately boosts brand image and reputation.


When Do You Measure CSAT?

Now that you know how to calculate CSAT, when should you seek feedback from your customers?

Technically, there is no right or wrong time to seek feedback from customers. However, there are proven moments when measuring CSAT is ideal.

Here are the three instances when you should analyze customer satisfaction during the customer journey:

  1. During the User Onboarding and Post-Purchase Stage

Sending customer satisfaction surveys during user onboarding and post-purchase helps you gather valuable insights that can help you improve the onboarding experience.

At this stage, the user has likely determined whether your product solves their problem or not. Sending a survey can help you know what needs to be improved.

You can also send surveys to track user motivations for signing up with a question like:

  1. Before Subscription Renewal

For subscription-based products, collecting feedback about your customer’s experience with your product a few months before renewal is a great idea.
This will help you act on the feedback before the customer gets into the renewal phase.

  1. Post Customer Support or Education Interactions

The other ideal time to use a customer satisfaction score is immediately after customer support interaction or customer education touchpoints.

For instance, you could ask customers a satisfaction question after they finish reviewing a knowledge base article or after interacting with customer service to determine the effectiveness of your customer support.

Essentially, you should measure CSAT at crucial stages of the customer journey.


What's a Good CSAT Score?

For many industries, a score between 65 and 80% is considered the maximum score. Below 60% indicates a problem with your product or service. Above 80% is an excellent score.

Generally, CSAT benchmark scores vary from one industry to another.

Here is a breakdown of CSAT scores for SaaS brands based on industry benchmarks:

CSAT Score (Meaning)

  • Above 80%: Excellent score. Your customers are satisfied with their experience with your product or service.

  • Between 60% - 80%: A good score. A good number of your customers are satisfied but there are certain areas of improvement

  • Between 40% - 60%: A decent score but you should collect customer feedback to improve your product or service

  • From 0% - 40%: A bad score. The majority of your customers are unsatisfied with their experience. Conduct multiple surveys to find out why customers are unhappy with your product or service and make improvements strategically. Evaluate customer churn rate as well.

If after calculating CSAT regularly, your scores keep on increasing, the majority of your customers are happy with your product or service. The opposite is also true.


What are the Advantages and Disadvantages of CSAT?

CSAT, like other customer experience metrics, has advantages and disadvantages including:

Advantages
  • It’s a flexible metric: You can customize the survey questions as well as the rating system to match your audience and make it relevant to the context.

  • It’s quick and easy to calculate: Calculating CSAT is straightforward. Get the total positive responses, divide the figure you get by the total responses from the survey then multiply what you get with 100.

  • Good response rate: CSAT surveys feature a single question, increasing the chances of getting a higher response rate.

  • Simple to customers: CSAT features a single survey question making it simple for customers to give a response.

  • Easy to analyze: The CSAT score is usually in the form of numerical data, making it easy to interpret

Disadvantages
  • Might not indicate overall customer experience: When responding to a CSAT survey question, customers may provide positive or negative feedback based on how they feel at that moment. Or their satisfaction could be based on a single factor of your product or service.

  • Might not indicate customer loyalty: A high CSAT score indicates customers are happy with their experience but might not mean they are likely to become repeat customers.

  • Might provide biased results: Sometimes customers may not provide an honest opinion or feedback about their experience.

  • Not comprehensive: The survey aims at establishing how satisfied customers are with your product hence might not uncover customer experiences in detail.

  • Only uncovers individual experiences: Customers respond based on their individual experiences, which means they cannot respond on behalf of a team or their company.


What’s the Difference between CSAT, NPS, and CES?

Customer Satisfaction Score, Net Promoter Score, and Customer Effort Score are three key customer satisfaction metrics to track frequently to offer the best experience to your customers at all times.

However, the three metrics track different aspects of the customer experience.

CSAT is a powerful metric that indicates how satisfied customers are with your product or service. It is measured after asking customers a simple survey question like this:

Sending CSAT surveys helps to determine how happy/unhappy customers are with your product, customer support, or a decision your company made.

NPS (Net Promoter Score) measures how loyal a customer is and their likelihood to recommend your product or service to other users based on a simple survey question like this.

The idea of NPS is to gauge customer loyalty and satisfaction with your product or service as well as their likelihood to spread the word about your brand. It's an accurate predictor of customer loyalty.

On the other hand, CES (Customer Effort Score) measures how easy or difficult it is for a customer to use your product, interact with your brand or service, or complete a transaction.

In other words, it focuses on determining the effort a customer makes when using your product or service, often using a specialized customer experience program.

 

CSAT Usage Guide

Uncovering satisfied customers isn’t enough. You need to go a step further to determine what makes them satisfied or dissatisfied.

If a majority of customers are unhappy, you need to know why and come up with a strategy to convert them into happy customers.

For this, you need to consider both quantitative and qualitative feedback gained from the survey. Additionally, you should measure CSAT alongside NPS and CES to get a comprehensive view of the customer experience your company offers to customers.


Measuring CSAT in Open-Ended Responses

CSAT shows you the percentage of customers who expressed their satisfaction with your product or service.

This quantitative data doesn’t provide actionable insights into why your customers are satisfied or dissatisfied.

You need to gather qualitative insights by including open-ended questions in your survey to allow customers to provide open-ended responses. This will help you understand customer sentiment, their feelings,  and ideas that can help you improve their experience.

For instance, in your CSAT survey, you can have a question like, “On a scale of 1 to 7 how was your experience when interacting with our customer service?”

You can then include an open-ended question: “Please describe any issue you encountered. This will help us improve the experience”

From this survey, you will gain both quantitative and qualitative insights that will help you uncover the experience customers had with your company and why.

With 1Flow survey templates, you can launch CSAT surveys and customize your questions to match the results you want to obtain.

Linking CSAT to Customer Experience and Increased Revenue

Great customer experience can encourage your customers to become loyal to your company, recommend you to others, and even spend more on your product. It can also increase the Customer Lifetime Value and expand your customer base.

According to SuperOffice statistics, 86% of customers say they will spend more after a great experience. Tracking CSAT can help you invest in CX initiatives aimed at boosting overall customer experience, which can ultimately double your revenue.


1Flow: Here's How We Can Help You Collect Better CSAT Responses

Evaluating CSAT at multiple touchpoints is not only a great idea for improving customer experience but can also drive company growth and long-term success. It can also be a powerful tool for standing out from your competition.

But this can only be achieved when you use a robust CSAT survey software to collect both positive and negative feedback from your customers.

1Flow enables you to launch effective in-app surveys to collect actionable customer feedback when customers are browsing your website or interacting with your mobile app to improve overall customer satisfaction.

  • The tool’s precise targeting enables you to launch surveys targeted to the right audience at the right moment.

  • With the customizable templates, you can add your logo, fonts, colors and other branding elements to your surveys for a professional design.

  • It integrates with any mobile and web platforms to enable you to launch and measure CSAT score seamlessly.

  • 1Flow is simple and user-friendly for both beginners and experts alike. You don’t need any technical or coding knowledge to deploy CSAT surveys. Plus, you're guaranteed quick response time on your surveys.

Ready to calculate your CSAT score and keep your customers satisfied ?

Sign up for 1Flow today! 14-day unlimited use free trial included.



Improve your product with better customer insights

Analytics tools tell you what a user does, but not why they are doing it. Our customizable in-product microsurveys give you all the answers you need to make great product decisions.

Get started with a free trial

We offer a 14-day unlimited use free trial - no credit card required.