CSAT, or customer satisfaction score, is the percentage of surveyed customers who rated their experience positively.
How it is calculated
Ask a customer after an interaction how satisfied they were, usually on a five-point
scale. CSAT is the number of top-two ratings divided by all ratings, as a percentage. Four
out of five on a five-point scale counts as satisfied. Three does not.
So an 85% CSAT means 85% of the people who answered gave you a four or a five. It does
not mean 85% of your customers are happy, and the distance between those two statements is
the main thing to understand about the metric.
The three distortions
Only some people answer. Survey response rates in customer service are
usually low. The people who respond are disproportionately the delighted and the furious.
The large middle, mildly inconvenienced and now mildly less loyal, mostly does not
answer.
The question changes the answer. “Were you satisfied with our
support?” and “Was your problem solved?” produce different numbers from the same
interaction. An agent can be lovely about a policy that failed the customer, and CSAT will
reward it.
Timing changes the answer. Asked immediately after a warm reply, the
score reflects the reply. Asked after the replacement arrived, it reflects the outcome.
Pick the one you actually want to manage.
What to do with it
CSAT is useful as a trend on a stable method, and close to useless as an absolute to
compare with another company. Three practical rules.
- Freeze the question, the scale and the timing. A change to any of them resets the
series. - Read the comments, not just the score. The score tells you something moved. Only the
comments say what. - Segment it. Satisfaction on order-status questions and satisfaction on complaints are
different businesses sharing one number.
CSAT and automation
A common fear is that automating replies will push the score down. What the review
evidence in this category actually shows is that the complaint pattern runs the other way.
Across 2,793 public reviews of 67 customer service and chatbot apps on the Shopify App
Store, support quality was the top complaint theme at 19%. Slow and absent answers annoy
people more reliably than automated ones do. A fast correct automated answer generally
scores better than a slow human one, and worse than a fast human one.
The risk to watch is not automation. It is automation with no way out. A customer who
cannot reach a person when they need one will mark you down regardless of how well the
bot wrote. See live chat handover.
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