What is a Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score?

Published on the 10th of August 2020

A Customer Satisfaction score, often referred to by the abbreviation CSAT, is a score that indicates how satisfied your customers are. There are different ways of asking a question to get the CSAT score.

Customer Satisfaction example questions

Given that satisfaction is a relative broad term, to get a CSAT score you can ask questions in many different ways. Here are some examples:

How would you rate your sign up experience?

How was your purchase experience?

How satisfied are you with the support you just received?

The 3 rules for good CSAT questions

There are three key points to keep in mind when setting CSAT questions:

1

Remember you’re measuring satisfaction, not effort. So, on a product-selection page you would ask:

How happy are you with the selection of products?

rather than

How easy was it for you to find the product you wanted?

2

It’s generally best to pick questions that are relevant to the specific page the customer is on at the time. For example, if a customer is looking up clothes sizes it usually makes more sense to ask:

How happy are you with the selection of sizes available?

than

How would you rate your overall experience with us?

3

If there are multiple questions you could ask, then you should usually focus on the one which is most relevant to your business goals. Don't overwhelm your customers with too many survey and questions.

Scale

CSAT can be measured using a 5 point scale. You can either use the 5 scale emoji survey or a 5 star survey. Emojis are actually a really fun and friendly way to get feedback from your customers. If it fits your brand definitely use them. You can even select from 14 different emojis.

Feedback Emoji Angry Face Feedback Emoji Frowning Face Feedback Emoji Smiling Face Feedback Emoji Grinning Face with Smiling Eyes Feedback Emoji Smiling Face with Heart Eyes
Star rating Star rating Star rating Star rating Star rating

What measuring CSAT looks like with Freddy Feedback

Customer Satisfaction Score Survey example

A beautiful and simple widget that you customers can use to provide you with feeback.

Then in your Freddy Feedback dashboard, you'll have a simple overview of the average score, score breakdown and all the responses:

Customer Effort Score • Freddy Feedback dashboard

Measure CSAT over a longer period of time

CSAT really is about the long term. You don't gather this score for 2 weeks and then stop, but ideally you track this over a longer period of time. By keeping the question the same, you can track your progress, see the average CSAT score over time and know if you're actually improving the customer's satisfaction.

That doesn't mean that the individual responses that you get aren't useful. You can zoom in and look at responses individually to see where customers get stuck, what they like and what they don't like and then improve based on this feedback.

Should I use CSAT?

We said this for the Customer Effort Score (CES) as well: don't get too hung up on abbreviations. Instead of focussing on 'fancy' abbreviations, think about what feels natural to ask your customers. Just imagine a friend asks you the question that you're about to ask your customers in a survey. Would that question sound right and friendly?

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