You can have a top-notch product or service but if the customer remains unsatisfied, your brand’s reputation can take a serious hit. A good review spreads fast but a bad one even faster. That is why successful companies like Nordstorm, Ritz-Carlton, and Zappos place exceptional value on customer feedback and customer experience.
Customer service shouldn’t be a department, it should be the entire company.”
– Tony Hsieh
What is CSAT?
With the surge of internet access and social media use, it is critical that companies respond well to the voice of a dissatisfied customer. Owing to its simplicity, CSAT is one of the most acclaimed and accepted methods to measure customer satisfaction.
Simply put, CSAT, or Customer Satisfaction Score is a measure of customer happiness. It is measured using brief feedback surveys, generally after a ticket is resolved or a conversation has concluded. While absolutely varying on a business model, at the core the follow-up survey asks the customer to rate their resolution experience on a scale, say 1-5 or “Good, Bad, Neutral”.
CSAT measures the number of happy customers by basically aggregating all your positive feedback across all responses received and multiplying it with 100 to give you a CSAT percentage.
Number of Positive Response / Number of Responses * 100
What is a Good Customer Satisfaction Score?
The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) is a great place to compare peers in the industry, vastly used by researchers, organizations, analysts, investors. The Index measures the satisfied customers of U.S. households with the quality of products and services offered by both foreign and domestic firms with significant share in U.S. markets. According to the ACSI, the current overall U.S. Customer Satisfaction Score is 75.3%. However, when it comes to industry, CSAT varies.
Here is a quick glance at top CSAT scores in the Internet Retailer industry, with the industry benchmark at 81%.
| Internet Retailers | 2018 | 2019 | Previous Year % Change |
| Amazon | 82 | 83 | 1.2 |
| Nordstrom | 81 | 82 | 1.2 |
| Etsy | 81 | 82 | 1.2 |
| HP Store | 80 | 81 | 1.3 |
| Internet Retail | 80 | 81 | 1.3 |
| Nike | 81 | 81 | 0 |
| Kohl’s | 81 | 81 | 0 |
| Costco | 83 | 81 | -2.4 |
| Newegg | 80 | 81 | 1.3 |
| Wayfair | 80 | 80 | 0 |
| Macy’s | 80 | 80 | 0 |
| Overstock | 80 | 79 | -1.3 |
Pros and Cons of using CSAT
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is a highly actionable consumer-oriented metric. Here we’ve listed some pros and cons of using this specific KPI –
Pros:
- A simple and straightforward KPI to implement that can be understood by everyone.
- Highly customizable to match businesses’ needs. In HappyFox Helpdesk, we provide you with a 1-3 (Unsatisfied, Neutral, Satisfied) rating scale but these can be easily customized to match emoticons, stars, or another number scale.
- Because this is a concise survey, the response rate is much higher than other customer metrics.
Cons:
- CSAT satisfaction can be skewed as it is an indication of the last touchpoint or a specific interaction before the survey is sent out.
- Depending on how the rating scale is set, the ratings can be ambiguous. It can be hard to determine how different Dissatisfied is from Neutral or Bad; or how on a point scale of 1-10, 1 being worst, how bad is the rating 4.
- While perfect for a short-term assessment of a product or service; for a longer assessment such as Customer Loyalty, one has to opt for other KPIs such as NPS(Net Promoter Score) that use a single question such as “Would you recommend us?” or CES (Customer Effort Score).
CSAT in Customer Service
Given customer support teams’ daily customer interaction through emails, chats, phone calls, it is a common practice to employ CSAT surveys to gauge the quality of their services. These are usually done at the very end, through an email, end of the Chat, and commonly these days, through SMSes on their phone number.
CSAT is a particularly good fit for call centers due to its versatility, they can be adjusted conveniently to pinpoint areas of conflict by-products or used to gauge agent effectiveness at the overall satisfaction of the customer experience.
Conclusion
CSAT surveys can be used wherever you need to measure customer sentiment. You can ask the CSAT question during the ticket resolution, accessing Knowledge Base, during a sales process, and across many more areas of the customer lifecycle.
To get the true essence of customer service initiatives, it is important to use CSAT in conjunction with other KPIs such as First Time Response, Resolution Time to give the overall health of your call center’s customer success. HappyFox Help Desk comes with customer satisfaction survey templates that make it simple and easy to configure and collect survey responses. These survey ratings then can be used by our Business Intelligence tool to give you the CSAT and industry-standard KPIs, together with giving you a holistic overview of your Support ecosystem.
