Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is a common metric used to measure customer satisfaction levels. This includes satisfaction with a company’s products, services, or interactions.It is usually collected through customer satisfaction surveys, in which customers rather their experience on a scale. Calculating the CSAT is one of the most transparent ways to know what your customers are feeling.
How Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) Works
A CSAT or customer satisfaction survey is simple and direct. It uses a scale of 1 to 5 or 1 to 10 to assess satisfaction levels on a support interaction, the product after an update, or a service after its completion. You want to push for a high score on these. In contact centers, the CSAT score mainly measures customer satisfaction after a support interaction. Here’s what you need to collect and calculate your CSAT scores.
Collecting CSAT Scores
- Prompting the Customer: At the end of an interaction, your agent or chatbot should prompt the user to rate their satisfaction levels. Put the question about satisfaction levels right after the interaction, so the customer quickly answers and disconnects the call. This in not time-consuming for the agent or the customer.
- Rating Scale: Using a rating scale is an effective way to remove the ambiguity around customer responses. A rating on a scale of 1 to 5 is good for general assessment, a 1 to 10 rating scale can give you an even better understanding. Here 1 stands for Very Dissatisfied, and 10 means Very Satisfied.
When collecting scores over the phone, or online, make sure you incentivize the customer to answer. At the very least, make it extremely easy for the user to respond to your CSAT survey. Work on scripts with your calling team to keep the interaction short, but honest. Online use fun ways like emoticons or stickers to make surveys interesting. If the survey data is very consequential to organizational change, think of how you can incentivize users to respond.
Calculating Your CSAT
Calculating CSAT assesses the number of satisfied customers vs dissatisfied customers. This gives you a percentage of customers who are happy with the service. You can also calculate the average (composite customer satisfaction score) of all scores, to measure customer sentiment (net positive or net negative). Out of the two, calculating percentages is the more prevalent method of measuring customer satisfaction because it exclusively separates positive and negative interactions.
- CSAT (as a percentage) Formula: (Number of Positive Responses / Total Responses) x 100 = CSAT Percentage
- Composite CSAT Formula: (Sum of All Responses/Total Number of Responses) = CSAT Average
Optimizing your CSAT
Optimizing CSAT often comes down to optimizing contact center operations as a whole. This requires many elements of customer interaction to fall perfectly in line. Here are a few quick wins to help improve CSAT scores.
- Agent Training: Your agents are pivotal to customer satisfaction. Positive customer interactions can only be created by well-trained agents who can resolve queries quickly and efficiently.
- Reduce Customer Effort: Customer effort score is a different metric that also impacts customer satisfaction scores. It measures how easy it is for customers to get their queries resolved. Lowering your CES directly improves your CSAT levels.
- Personalized Interactions: Using CRM systems enables you to create personalized interactions. When a customer calls, your agent should have their information along with any open tickets. This helps maintain continuity across interactions, without having the customer repeat basic information.
- Timely Responses: Always respond to customer queries in a reasonable amount of time. This could be via email, phone, or chat. Long wait times hurt customer satisfaction.
- Periodic Feedback Loops: Seek customer feedback regularly through surveys and focus groups. Regular feedback sessions help you improve your product or service, which is a net win for your customers and your business.
- Follow-Up Surveys: Complaints within a survey should be followed by another survey after the complaints raised have been resolved. Doing so informs the customer about the change, and makes them feel that their feedback is heard. This will help you build customer loyalty in the long term.
Why Does CSAT Matter?
CSAT measures customer satisfaction levels. Out of all the customer satisfaction metrics, CSAT is the most transparent and easy way to measure satisfaction levels. Usually administered at the end of an interaction, CSAT helps you understand how well your business is at meeting customer expectations. By tracking CSAT regularly, you can identify issues early, improve customer retention, and improve your reputation. That being said CSAT must be reviewed alongside other contact center metrics like Customer Effort Score (CES) and Net Promoter Scores (NPS). This will give a more holistic picture of customer sentiment.
