What is Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
It is imperative for companies to know if what they provide meets the expectations of the customers. If the gap between what they offer and what customers require is far, the brand is bound to stumble and tumble. So how can companies identify if their services and products are up to the mark? Only by asking their customers.
That’s where the significance of CSAT surveys comes to the fore. It’s one of the most sought-after ways to know how customers feel about an interaction they had with you, a purchase they made, or the experience they had with your brand.
So, to put it out there, customer satisfaction score (or more popularly called CSAT), is a well-established metric utilized to gauge the level of customer satisfaction with a specific product, service, or interaction. It serves as a valuable tool for businesses to assess and monitor customer satisfaction trends over time.
CSAT is commonly measured through structured surveys or questionnaires that prompt customers to provide a numerical rating, typically on a scale of 1 to 5 or 1 to 10, reflecting their satisfaction level. These surveys may also incorporate open-ended questions to capture qualitative feedback from customers.
By calculating the average rating bestowed by customers, the CSAT score is derived. A higher average score indicates a heightened level of customer satisfaction. CSAT scores typically range from 0 to 100, with a score of 100 denoting complete customer contentment.
The CSAT metric enables businesses to identify areas for improvement, evaluate the efficacy of customer service initiatives, and assess overall customer loyalty. It serves as a valuable source of insights into customer perceptions, empowering organizations to make informed, data-driven decisions aimed at enhancing their products, services, and overall customer experiences.
When should you use CSAT?
A CSAT survey efficiently brings you quality feedback when employed at the right time. Sending online surveys ages after a customer interacts with you does little or no good. The customer wouldn’t even remember the context and your surveys will remain un-taken.
So when’s the right time to use CSAT?
Right after Sales or Support interactions
A customer interacts with your company at various touchpoints. Right after communication, the experience is fresh in the minds of the customers. Therefore, when you seek to measure CSAT then, you are sure to get valuable inputs from them, both good and bad. Besides, you can also understand how each sector of your organization is interacting with customers. CSAT helps to uncover the level of client satisfaction at every touchpoint.
Regular intervals
Sending CSAT surveys at regular intervals is a great way to know the pulse of customers. It is imperative to understand that customer satisfaction cannot be achieved overnight. It is a recurring process that must be planned carefully and aligned. Therefore, ensure that your organization selects a time frame- monthly or quarterly, for instance, to send out surveys to measure CSAT. Creating a customer-interaction calendar for the same will help to bring all your resources on the same page to avoid bombarding your customers with CSAT questionnaires.
Customer onboarding
Many organizations fail to understand the significance of customer onboarding in a rush to grab leads and turn them into clients. When a customer picks your product or service, it is crucial that you help them out at every step rather than leaving them on their own to figure things out. Effective onboarding creates happier customers and potentially loyal customers who can turn into brand advocates in the future. Therefore, sending CSAT surveys after customer onboarding helps to keep your client-base happier and long-lasting.
What are the steps to collect CSAT data?
CSAT is one of the simplest ways to know the pulse of your customers. Here are four simple steps to collect CSAT data from your customers to drive your business toward growth.
Create engaging CSAT questionnaires
CSAT score is estimated by seeking customer feedback about a product/service they recently used. While you draft your questionnaires, keep them engaging, and don’t make your respondents doze off. Online surveys are infamous for being mundane. Therefore, adding personalization features and conditional logic branching will help to make your surveys as close to human interactions as possible. Ask right to get the best responses from them.
Share Questionnaires
Once you draft your CSAT questionnaires, the next step is to share them across different channels. These channels can be social media, web links, email surveys, SMS options, etc. More the channels you employ to share online surveys, the better it is. When respondents can pick the channel that’s most convenient to them, it directly reflects in the quality of feedback they receive. Boost the visibility of your online surveys and make sure they reached every customer of yours.
Analyze the CSAT results
Once you get the CSAT data in hand, the analysis is what follows. However, thanks to customer feedback software that is ubiquitous in the market, the analysis doesn’t make an analyst rummage through reports. It is easy to interpret the data and even easier to gain insights. Once you gain insights, you can understand what’s lacking and where improvements need to be undertaken quickly. Consequently, you can provide a better customer experience and support.
Follow-up and improve
People have a natural hesitance to take a survey and complete it. A contributing factor to this aversion is that they feel their feedback goes unheard. Many companies stop after gathering feedback. Therefore, it is essential that you reach out to your customers and assure them that you listen to their voice which drives them to quality feedback when you venture out to measure CSAT next. Moreover, follow-ups help to increase engagement with customers as well.
Advantages of CSAT
CSAT offers several distinct advantages as a customer satisfaction metric, providing businesses with valuable insights into their customer relationships.
- Direct Measure of Customer Satisfaction: CSAT serves as a direct and quantifiable measure of customer satisfaction, allowing businesses to assess the extent to which they meet customer expectations. This tangible metric helps organizations gauge their performance in satisfying customers’ needs and desires.
- Actionable Feedback for Improvement: CSAT surveys provide a platform for customers to express their opinions and offer specific feedback. The inclusion of open-ended questions allows customers to provide qualitative insights, highlighting areas of strength and areas for improvement. This actionable feedback empowers businesses to make informed decisions to enhance their products, services, and overall customer experience.
- Targeted Analysis and Improvement: CSAT surveys enable businesses to identify specific areas where they excel or fall short in satisfying customers. By analyzing the survey results, organizations can pinpoint precise aspects of their operations that require attention, allowing for targeted improvement efforts. This focused approach saves resources by directing efforts where they will have the greatest impact.
- Performance Tracking and Benchmarking: Regularly measuring CSAT scores provides a means of tracking performance over time. By establishing baseline scores and tracking changes, businesses can assess the effectiveness of their initiatives and interventions. Additionally, benchmarking CSAT scores against industry standards or competitors’ performance offers valuable context, enabling organizations to gauge their relative position and identify areas for differentiation.
- Customer-Centric Decision-Making: CSAT places the customer at the forefront of decision-making. By prioritizing customer satisfaction as a key metric, businesses foster a customer-centric culture that drives continuous improvement. This focus on customer needs and preferences enhances customer loyalty, strengthens brand reputation, and contributes to long-term success.
Disadvantages of CSAT
While CSAT is a valuable metric for measuring customer satisfaction, it is essential to recognize its potential disadvantages.
- Limited Scope: CSAT focuses solely on measuring satisfaction and may overlook other critical aspects of the customer experience, such as loyalty, advocacy, or emotional connection with the brand. Relying solely on CSAT may provide an incomplete picture of overall customer sentiment.
- Subjective Nature: CSAT scores are based on customers’ subjective perceptions and can be influenced by individual biases, emotions, or temporary circumstances. This subjectivity introduces a level of variability and may not always reflect the objective reality of customer satisfaction.
- Lack of Context: CSAT surveys often lack context or deeper insights into specific issues. The scores do not provide a comprehensive understanding of the underlying reasons for low or high satisfaction levels, making it challenging to identify the precise areas that require improvement.
- Incomplete Feedback: While CSAT surveys may include open-ended questions, the responses provided may be limited in scope or fail to capture the full range of customer experiences. This limitation can hinder the ability to address specific pain points or uncover crucial insights for meaningful improvements.
- Survey Fatigue: Customers may experience survey fatigue when asked to participate in frequent CSAT surveys or questionnaires. This fatigue can lead to rushed or less thoughtful responses, potentially impacting the accuracy and reliability of the CSAT scores obtained.
How to measure CSAT with SurveySparrow
A customer satisfaction survey software can quickly help you collect all the data you need to know about customer pulse. And with a minute’s read, you’ll know how SurveySparrow can help you collect CSAT data from your clients proficiently.
Dual Interface
SurveySparrow’s CSAT tool comes with not just one but two interfaces to provide an engaging survey experience. Survey creators can choose between chat-like surveys and conversational forms to get the best answers from their customers. If you thought it was difficult to obtain decent completion rates for your online surveys, we say ‘Go conversational and get higher response rates than ever!’
Recurring Surveys
As we said, employing CSAT is not a one-time process. It has to be implemented meticulously to get the best results. With SurveySparrow, you can do this promptly. You needn’t spend hours resending the same surveys periodically; SurveySparrow can take care of it for you. Recurring surveys help you to send online surveys at regular intervals, automatically. Therefore, you can save time & resources.
Survey Share Options
SurveySparrow offers multiple survey share options to ensure that your online survey reaches all your customers. These channels include:
- Email surveys
- Social Media
- Weblinks
- SMS share
- Embed Option
Robust Reporting Module
SurveySparrow comes with a powerful reporting system that charts-out detailed reports of the survey responses. Advanced filters help you sort responses to precisely extract the data you wish to get. In no time, you can turn your CSAT data into refined information.
Diverse Question Types
What you ask in a CSAT questionnaire is essential just like the way you ask. Therefore, SurveySparrow brings you distinct question types to get quality satisfaction feedback from your customers.
Survey Themes
The time when online surveys were considered boring is over. With the right CSAT tool like SurveySparrow, you can design your online surveys to make them interactive and engaging. You can pick a theme from our gallery or go ahead and make one yourself!
Integration Feature
SurveySparrow is not a stand-alone CSAT platform. You can integrate SurveySparrow with other third-party applications using webhooks and Zapier integration. Consequently, you can build a seamless workflow and manage all your applications under a single roof.
Free Survey Templates
SurveySparrow’s free survey templates collection will help you get started with your online surveys in absolutely no time! Be it market research, customer feedback, customer satisfaction, or employee engagement, you say, and we’ve it for you. Pick one of your requirements, tweak it to tailor-fit your needs, and create your survey in minutes!
Free NPS Calculator
If you are collecting NPS data along with CSAT, here’s our free NPS calculator to compute your organization’s NPS score in a blink. You can skip searching for another tool to calculate your NPS score!
