What is Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and How to Measure it in the Call Center

Customer Satisfaction, or CSAT, is a score to measure how satisfied your clients are with your product or service. You can create CSAT scores in multiple ways collecting them from a variety of customers in a specified period which can give you an average of how satisfied your customers are. This data can then be used to make more informed business decisions and better customer outreach strategies related to both customer service and sales.

How to measure CSAT?

While many companies measure CSAT according to their own business needs, there are some approaches that are regularly used across most industries. In order to measure CSAT, you need to ask your customers’ opinions about your service directly. Usually, this is done via email or phone.

Binary Questions

While most CSAT surveys vary, a few commonly phrased questions are ones with a yes or no answer or, a scaled rating.

Binary, or yes or no questions are usually worded accordingly:

Are you satisfied with (company’s product/service)? (Yes/No)

This is probably the simplest method for accumulating data. While this method does not generate in-depth data on where your customers stand in relation to your services, it does have some specific benefits. For one, most customers are willing to participate, as it takes little time, or effort to answer these types of questions. This can enable you to generate a lot of data. Additionally, it solves the issue of cultural differences, as more complex questions could easily be misinterpreted depending on the country that the respondent is from.

Scale Ratings

If you want to generate more complex data, a common way is to measure CSAT via scaled ratings. Scaled ratings are usually worded accordingly:

On a scale of 1-10, how satisfied are you with (company’s product/service)?

How would you rate your satisfaction with (company’s product/service)?

In such cases, it is up to your company to decide which answers qualify as satisfied. For example, at the customer support center of VCC Live, our system automatically sends out an email reminder to our customer support and business leaders, when a client answers 7 or less on our CSAT scale. In such cases, they directly get in touch with our clients, to further investigate the issue.

Calculating your CSAT value depends on the question. However, the calculation below can be applicable for most cases, enabling you to understand the percentage of satisfied customers you have.

Number of customers who are in the satisfied range/total number of customers asked x 100 = % of satisfied customers

What is a good CSAT score?

Because CSAT measurements vary across industries and businesses, there is no universal score to aim for. However, generally speaking, you want to aim for the highest percentage of satisfied customers as possible.

It may also be useful to benchmark your scores against other companies in your industry. Make sure to understand customer service trends and expectations in your industry, and adjust your CSAT goals according to your own industry.

CSAT or NPS

CSAT is commonly mixed up with Net Promoter Score, or NPS. As discussed above, CSAT can greatly vary based on your industry and specific business needs. However, NPS is a standardized method. Additionally, NPS measures brand loyalty, not just customer satisfaction. The standard question asked when measuring NPS is:

How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?

The answers are then scored on a zero to then scale. Those who scored 9-10 are promoters of your brand, and those who scored lower are either neutral or detractors.

Given that NPS measures brand loyalty, it can be used in combination with CSAT, but it is important to understand that these scores measure different things. CSAT can predict churn, and NPS can indicate customer retention.

CSAT can be a great way for measuring the quality of your service. In order to get the most out of your measurements, make sure to design questions according to your industry. Whether you decide to use binary or scaled ratings, remember that there is no unified CSAT score that you should aim for. Set your own benchmarks and understand the standards of your industry. Finally, tracking your NPS score can be a nice addition to your CSAT if you want to further understand your brand loyalty.