Measuring customer satisfaction with the Customer Satisfaction Score

With the Customer Satisfaction Score, you can easily survey customer satisfaction in a specific area of your business or with your products or services at regular intervals. For example, you can ask your customers’ satisfaction about your ordering process, website, complaint handling, support, and more.

The CSAT method is another important indicator that helps you better understand the customer and their satisfaction at each touchpoint along the customer journey. It simply uses a question, like the NPS or CES survey, that allows your customers to share their feedback on a scale.

With the help of the CSAT, you can determine with little effort how satisfied your customers are with individual areas of your company. This enables you to identify specific weaknesses and make adjustments. 

If your CSAT survey shows, for example, that your customers are very satisfied with the ordering process because it’s fast and uncomplicated, that’s great. If, on the other hand, your customers say that complaints are lengthy and time-consuming, then you should adapt this process if necessary. So it makes sense to focus your resources on improving the complaints process. 

In this respect, the CSAT supports you in directing your resources in a targeted manner and thus saving money and time by not putting your resources (more) into areas that are already running well. After all, it does not make your customers more satisfied in the long run if processes that are already running well are adjusted, but improving processes that have been running less well so far increases your customers’ satisfaction immensely.

Using a scale from 1 (very dissatisfied) to 5 (very satisfied), your customers can reflect their feedback and satisfaction, for example, on your ordering process or the new function you offer in your tool. 

Then, the CSAT can be calculated using the following formula:

(Number of all satisfied (4) and very satisfied (5) ratings / Number of all ratings) * 100 = Customer satisfaction (%).

The good thing is, you can use the CSAT survey at every touchpoint of the customer journey. Not only is it flexible to use, but you can use it as often as you need to. The important thing here is that only one aspect is surveyed per satisfaction survey. 

You should not mix different areas in a CSAT survey. On the one hand, this takes the focus away from optimizing one touch point, and on the other hand, it would distort the results of the survey.   

For inspiration on how to apply CSAT surveys in your company as well, we have listed a few possible use cases below. Why not ask your customers about their satisfaction in the following areas? 

• Ordering process
• Web site
• Customer service
• Complaint handling
• Use of a product 
  
• Use of a new function/service
• Store visit
• and much more…

While the Net Promotor Score asks about customer satisfaction and loyalty in terms of willingness to recommend, the Customer Satisfaction Score explores the customer’s satisfaction based on a specific interaction, such as the delivery time or the helpfulness of the service staff.