A customer satisfaction score—or CSAT score—is an important customer engagement metric that measures a buyer’s contentment with a business’s offerings and services.
Par Court Bishop, Contributing Writer
Dernière mise à jour March 6, 2024
Knowledge is power—especially when you’re looking to improve CSAT scores.
Regardless of industry, customer satisfaction is a must for a business’s success. Survey buyers regularly and track CSAT scores to gauge the customer experience
(CX). This can foster customer loyalty and help you learn where you excel and where you fall short.
To become a customer-centric business, you must understand how to collect and utilize CSAT data. In this article, we’ll go over exactly how to accomplish both tasks and offer some tips along the way.
A customer satisfaction score—or CSAT score— is a CX metric and key performance indicator (KPI) that gauges how happy consumers are with a purchase or interaction.
Support teams can find their company’s CSAT score by surveying customers with a Likert scale. A Likert scale is a popular survey rating system that allows users to rate their experiences by replying with a number. The number represents the level at which they agree or disagree with a question or statement.
To calculate customer satisfaction, surveyors ask a single question, like: How satisfied are you with [product/service/experience]?
Then you can follow up with either a five- or 10-point scale for customers to illustrate their satisfaction levels. The responses are typically:
Businesses can also follow up with a comment box to gather additional context from respondents.
Businesses can calculate their customer satisfaction scores using a CSAT calculator or formula. If using the formula method, use one of two formulas (composite or detailed) to calculate CSAT.
The basic process is as follows:
Note: The formulas are based on a five-point Likert scale. We’ll cover them both in-depth below.
Calculate customer satisfaction at your organization with our free CSAT calculator. Just enter the number of responses from your five- or 10-point CSAT survey to get a score.
| Response | 5-point scoring | 10-point scoring |
| Very satisfied | 5 | 9–10 |
| Satisfied | 4 | 7–8 |
| Neutral | 3 | 5–6 |
| Dissatisfied | 2 | 3–4 |
| Very dissatisfied | 1 | 1–2 |
Très satisfait : Indiquez le nombre total de répondants qui ont donné une note de 5 à leur niveau de satisfaction.
Satisfait Indiquez le nombre total de répondants qui ont donné une note de 4 à leur niveau de satisfaction.
Neutre : Indiquez le nombre total de répondants qui ont donné une note de 3 à leur niveau de satisfaction.
InsatisfaitInsatisfait : Indiquez le nombre total de personnes interrogées qui ont évalué leur niveau de satisfaction à 2.
Très insatisfaitTrès insatisfait : Indiquez le nombre total de répondants qui ont attribué la note 1 à leur niveau de satisfaction.
Client interrogés : 0
0 % Très satisfait 0 % Satisfait 0 % Neutre 0 % Insatisfait 0 % Très insatisfait
CSAT scores are important because customer service teams can analyze them and gather key insights that substantially impact customer experiences without exerting much effort. This CX metric can help businesses:
, 81 percent of consumers say a positive customer service
experience increases their likelihood of making another purchase.
If companies want to increase profitability and brand loyalty, they need to use customer feedback (like CSAT scores) to their advantage.
Unmet expectations lead to dissatisfaction. But by collecting user feedback at key touchpoints, you can determine if you’re meeting—and hopefully exceeding—your customers’ needs.
This helps you discover exactly what your customers need from your product or service and provides insights into their frustrations, sales bottlenecks, and the overall health of your company.
Businesses can make product or organizational changes to improve the customer experience using customer satisfaction survey results.
If you receive poor feedback, conduct more research to determine if the issues stem from lackluster sales and support interactions or dissatisfaction with your products. Depending on what you learn, you can implement impactful improvements such as:
When you have a large customer base, identifying individual buyers at risk of churning can be difficult.
By studying CSAT scores, you can often pinpoint unhappy customers, giving you time to make adjustments before you lose them. Plus, when consumers see that you’re accepting their feedback and actively improving your products and processes, it speaks volumes about your company’s commitment to its customers, and often inspires customer loyalty.
CSAT metrics don’t only measure dissatisfaction or customer churn; they can also help you create customer advocates.
While you should certainly pay attention to—and act on—negative feedback, positive comments can be just as beneficial for growing your business.
Pay attention to those who give you top scores and reach out to them. Thank them for their business, and ask them to leave a review or share their experience on social media to gain more word-of-mouth referrals.
There are a few CSAT formulas for calculating a CSAT score.
If you need general averages, use the composite CSAT formula. If you want more information about satisfied customers, use one of the detailed CSAT formulas listed below.
Calculate the composite score by adding up all of the customer satisfaction scores and dividing them by the highest possible score. Then, multiply by 100 to get the percentage.
Sum of all scores / total # of responses x 100 = % of satisfied customers
To calculate the percentage of satisfied customers, divide the total number of customers who are “very satisfied” (5) or “satisfied” (4) by the total number of responses. Then, multiply that result by 100 to get your customer satisfaction percentage.
# of satisfied respondents (rated you a 4 or 5) / # of total survey respondents x 100 = % of satisfied customers
To measure the number of extremely satisfied customers, divide the number of customers who rated you a 5 by the total number of respondents.
# of extremely satisfied respondents only (rated you a 5) / # of total survey respondents x 100 = % of extremely satisfied customers
Let’s review an example. Say you survey a group of 10 customers and receive the following responses.
In this scenario, “Respondent score” references the customers’ answers, and “Maximum score” refers to the total number of points they could have given you. Since the maximum score is 5, we can deduce that the CSAT survey is based on a five-point scale.
That means we can use either formula without making any adjustments.
The composite customer satisfaction score for this data set is 70 percent.
To find this answer, follow these five steps:
The detailed customer satisfaction score for this data set is 50 percent.
Follow these steps to calculate the percentage of satisfied or extremely satisfied customers:
Many industries consider a CSAT score between 75 and 85 percent as good and a score above 90 percent as exemplary.
Of course, this number is subjective, so expectations may vary slightly between industries and individual businesses.
Regardless of your percentage, if your CSAT score increases over time, your team is doing something right. Continue to measure your business’s success by setting benchmarks and regularly tracking your progress.
By administering CSAT surveys, business leaders can evaluate buyers’ satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) with the company’s products, services, and customer support. Here are a few useful ways to utilize CSAT score data:
To find more details about the standard in your industry, consult resources like the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). The ACSI provides CSAT score benchmarks
for a number of business sectors and individual companies.
Of course, this isn’t an exhaustive list of every existing sector and business type—but it’s a good start for benchmarking your CSAT scores against industry averages.
Consumer shipping: 77
Search engines and information: 75
Social media: 71
Online news and opinion: 73
Energy utilities: 72
Life insurance: 78
Property and casualty insurance: 78
Health insurance: 73
Online investment: 78
Banks: 78
Credit unions: 76
Financial advisors: 79
Public administration: 62.6
Local government: 62.1
Waste management: 73
Police: 59.5
Nonhospital care: 73
Hospitals: 71
Outpatient care: 77
Inpatient care: 74
Emergency room: 66
Automobiles: 77
Televisions: 80
Household appliances: 79
Personal computers: 79
Food: 79
Soft drinks: 81
Breweries: 80
Personal care: 79
Apparel: 78
Athletic shoes: 81
Fast food restaurants: 76
Full-service restaurants: 80
Gas stations: 65
Specialty retailers: 79
General merchandise retailers: 75
Drugstores: 76
Online retailers: 80
Supermarkets: 76
Cell phones: 72
Computer software: 78
Wireless phone service: 74
Subscription TV service: 69
Video streaming service: 77
Internet service providers: 68
Airlines: 76
Hotels: 73
Car rentals: 76
Online travel agencies: 74
Download five free customer satisfaction survey templates to learn how customers feel about your organization and identify ways to improve the customer experience.
Unless your CSAT score sits at 100 percent, there’s room for improvement. To achieve a better score, try out one of the following tactics to create change and impress customers.
The quality of support you provide significantly impacts customer satisfaction.
But before your agents can create memorable and positive customer experiences, you must prepare them with training, onboarding, and frictionless customer service software.
If you have already upgraded to a powerful CX system like Zendesk, you still need to train your team to use it effectively. Some ways you can help create a positive employee experience (EX) as your team adjusts to new software are through:
Whatever you choose, avoid dropping new software in your team’s lap without supplying education. Otherwise, any improvements you make will be purely cosmetic, and the same issues will continue to arise.
Placing customers on hold is inevitable, and while agents can multitask when messaging, chat queues can get backed up, too.
Even with the help of time-saving tools like Zendesk AI, support agents need time to answer questions, consult with their team, and, in some cases, gather more contextual information.
To keep customer frustrations to a minimum, be clear about wait times with your customers and offer support alternatives like texts or callbacks. A chatbot can also answer common questions or direct customers to self-service resources. In addition to reducing wait times for customers, this also benefits agents by lightening their workload.
When communicating digitally, you can do this by providing real-time, automated time estimates. Or, if you need to give callers a wait time estimate, your IVR (interactive voice response) can provide wait time estimates at regular intervals.
When providing time estimates, avoid being overly optimistic and reassure callers that you’re working as quickly as you can.
Our Customer Experience Trends Report 2023 revealed that 37 percent of customers become angry when they don’t have access to self-service resources or can’t resolve a simple issue on their own.
Improve customer experiences by offering more knowledge base resources, which make it easy and convenient for customers to problem solve any issues or answer any queries on their own. And since help centers are available around the clock, customers can get the information they need at any time.
Plus, self-service options benefit agents because it lightens their workload and frees up their time, so they can focus on more complex tasks.
CSAT surveys provide a must-see snapshot of current customer sentiment. Learn more about when you should measure customer satisfaction and additional methods of collecting CX insights below.
You can measure customer satisfaction scores after any interaction or “customer lifecycle moment.” But for organizations that want to refine their approach, these are some events that may warrant a customer survey:
Businesses can also survey consumers during the customer journey (sales process). Many companies do this after a sale, but a customer satisfaction survey can be completed after each stage in the customer journey.
It’s always best to survey customers when an experience is fresh in their minds, so consider automating CSAT surveys by setting up triggers that go off when an interaction like agent support, a purchase, or onboarding occurs.
Calculating CSAT scores benefits all companies because it gives business leaders insight into any issues that may require attention. Some advantages of CSAT surveys are:
There are no true disadvantages to measuring customer satisfaction, but businesses do need to be conscientious of factors that can sway survey results like:
because they’re straightforward and offer actionable insights.
While each KPI has its advantages, they are most useful to businesses that compare data to contextualize responses, providing a well-rounded view of customers’ feelings about—and interactions with—the company.
Create a customer-centric organization by asking for consumer feedback often and implementing it whenever possible. Businesses should use customer service platforms like Zendesk to calculate CSAT scores and make data-driven decisions that improve the overall customer experience.
This seemingly minor pivot can yield insights that increase sales, reduce customer churn, and may even save your company money on operational costs.
