CSAT: definition, calculation and tips for improving customer satisfaction
In a world where customer relations play a major role, you must constantly work to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. It's essential to optimize every aspect of your service production and distribution.
Among the tools available, CSAT stands out as a key indicator for assessing your customers' satisfaction after their interaction with your company. By relying on CSAT, you can gather valuable feedback that will help you adjust your strategies and better meet your customers' needs.
This article explores what CSAT is, the method for measuring the score, and the importance of this indicator in maintaining a positive customer relationship.
Definition of CSAT
The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT ) is a crucial indicator for measuring customer satisfaction after an interaction with your company. This score is obtained through post-interaction surveys that capture customer feelings while their experience is still fresh.
The ultimate goal is to transform the data collected from CSAT into concrete actions that not only improve the customer experience, but also increase loyalty and encourage customers to return. Used correctly, this score becomes an essential strategic tool for aligning your strategies with your customers' real needs and expectations.
What are the advantages of CSAT?
The CSAT score is simple to visualize, easy to interpret, and perfect for use on the fly after a customer interaction. It helps you collect customer feedback efficiently and adjust your strategies according to the results.
1. Precise results
CSAT provides accurate, true-to-life results thanks to its simple, standardized calculation method. This helps to clearly identify sources of frustration and to understand customer expectations. This information is crucial to better meet their needs and optimize their customer experience.
2. Simplicity
CSAT questions are often clear, concise and easy for everyone to understand. This format encourages more customers to respond, resulting in a high volume of positive, reliable answers. When customers find it easy to give their opinions, it reinforces the quality of the data collected and ensures an accurate assessment of their satisfaction levels.
3. Reliability
Due to the simplicity of the question and the way in which it is answered, a large number of responses are obtained. As a result, the results obtained are highly representative and therefore reliable for measuring customer satisfaction.
4. Universal application
The clarity of CSAT questions means that they can be asked of all customers without having to segment the customer base. This provides an overall picture of customer sentiment, and enables every point in the customer journey to be approached in a uniform manner.
5. Versatility
CSAT is a versatile indicator. It can evaluate different aspects of a product or service, making it easier to understand the various points of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. This enables you to adjust your offers to improve customer loyalty.
6. Real-time results
Thanks to this immediate feedback, you can quickly identify unhappy customers and intervene without delay. This helps maintain a high level of customer retention and reduce churn. Rapid results are essential for taking corrective action before problems escalate.
How to measure your CSAT score
To measure your customers' CSAT score, a satisfaction survey should be carried out immediately after a key interaction.
The most common way to do this is to ask a direct question such as :
"Are you satisfied with our products / services / answers provided?"
The user must be put in a position to provide a clear, concise answer in a simple, intuitive and effective way. Offer two types of response:
- Yes / No
- Graduated scale: very satisfied, satisfied, neutral, not very satisfied, not at all satisfied.
The graduated scale is often preferred, as it provides more detailed data. You can also use ratings from 1 to 5, stars or smileys.
How do you create an effective CSAT questionnaire?
A well-structured CSAT questionnaire is essential to accurately measure customer satisfaction. Here's how you can do it:
- Formulate clear questions: Make sure every question is simple and straightforward. Avoid jargon to ensure that all respondents understand.
- Use a simple scale: A scale of 1 to 5 or 1 to 10 is commonly used to measure satisfaction. This makes it easy for customers to evaluate their experience.
- Add a comment field: Offering a space for free responses allows customers to explain their rating. This feedback can provide valuable insights.
- Collect feedback on the fly: It's important to collect feedback shortly after the customer interaction or purchase to get accurate, authentic answers.
By following these steps, you'll maximize the effectiveness of your CSAT questionnaire, while improving the customer experience.
CSAT: calculation methods
To calculate the CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score), we first need to choose a measurement method adapted to the type of response we've chosen to submit to the customer.
One of the most common approaches uses a rating scale from 1 to 5. On this scale, a response is considered to be :
- Positive if rated 4 or 5.
- Negative if between 1 and 3
The formula for calculating CSAT is simple:
CSAT = (Number of positive responses / Total number of responses) x 100
By monitoring these scores, you can use customer satisfaction data to identify areas for improvement.
Bear in mind that response rates can vary, which can influence the accuracy of the CSAT. That's why it's important to collect enough responses to obtain a reliable result.
What makes a good CSAT?
A very good CSAT score is generally above 80%. This shows that the majority of your customers have a positive opinion of your brand.
On the contrary, if the score is below 50%, the result is negative, meaning that most customers are dissatisfied.
It's worth noting that expectations for a given sector can vary. That's why it's important to compare your score with industry standards.
What are the limits of CSAT?
The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) has a number of limitations which it is crucial to be aware of in order to interpret the results correctly. Here are the main limitations:
Partial results
CSAT measures customer satisfaction at a specific point in time. This means you're not evaluating the customer's overall experience with your brand over time. In other words, it doesn't capture the evolution of satisfaction or long-term commitment to your product or service.
Biased answers
Results can often be influenced by customers' state of mind when answering the questionnaire. Their mood or a particular recent experience may affect their answers, making the CSAT not fully representative of their true satisfaction.
Low response rate
CSAT surveys can sometimes have a low response rate. What's more, it's often those who have had a bad experience who tend to respond to the questionnaire to express their dissatisfaction. This tendency can skew the score by accentuating negative opinions, whereas the aim is to represent your customer base as a whole.
Incomplete measurement
CSAT evaluates a specific interaction, but does not take into account all aspects of the customer relationship, such as loyalty or recommendation. To get the full picture, you need to combine CSAT with other indicators. We'll look at just that in the next section.
Other indicators for measuring customer satisfaction
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
The NPS or Net Promoter Score is a valuable tool for understanding whether your customers are ready to recommend you.
The central question often asked is:
"On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?"
The results are divided into three categories:
- Detractors: These are those who give a score from 0 to 6. They are not satisfied and could potentially damage your reputation.
- Passive: With a score of 7 to 8, they are satisfied, but not satisfied enough to actively recommend your brand.
- Promoters: Those answering between 9 and 10 are highly satisfied and ready to recommend your services.
In other words, the notion of satisfaction here goes hand in hand with that of loyalty: a loyal customer will be more likely to recommend the brand to others, whereas a customer who is merely satisfied will not necessarily do so.
So, by combining CSAT with NPS, you can better understand how strong the relationships you've built up with your customers are.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
The CES, or customer effort score, measures the ease with which a customer can carry out an action towards the brand, such as a purchase.
A typical question might be:
"How much effort did you just put into your purchase/other action?"
This survey helps to identify obstacles within your services, such as website navigation, the payment process or others.
Unlike CSAT, which assesses satisfaction, CES identifies friction points that could discourage your customers and drive them towards your competitors.
At the root of the CES concept lies the following reasoning: customer satisfaction depends in part on the level of effort the customer has to make to implement his action.
The use of these two complementary tools, CSAT and CES, offers a more complete view of the customer experience.
What to do after measuring CSAT?
1. Analysis of results
Once you've measured your CSAT score, it's important to understand why customers gave you the ratings they did.
Asking an additional question like "Why?" allows you to gather open-ended feedback from customers. These responses, known as "verbatim", provide valuable information on the reasons for satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
To analyze these verbatims, it is useful touse semantic analysis tools, such asBatvoice's AI. These tools categorize recurring themes and convert this information into percentages to better understand trends. This helps you to quickly spot problems or identify what's working well in your departments as part of a continuous improvement approach.
2. Automated actions
Using CSAT scores, you can implement automated actions tailored to customer satisfaction levels.
For those who have given a low rating, e.g. 1 or 2 out of 5, an automatic notification to your customer support team can be set up. This will initiate a personal follow-up to resolve the problem and preserve your brand image.
Similarly, for those who give high ratings such as 4 or 5, you can automate the sending of thank-you messages. Offering benefits, such as loyalty points or encouraging them to share their positive experience, strengthens your relationship with customers and improves their satisfaction.
These actions reinforce their trust in your brand by showing that you are attentive to your customers' feelings.
3. CSAT as a marketing tool
The CSAT score can be a powerful asset in your marketing strategies. Use it to demonstrate customer satisfaction in advertising campaigns, interviews or public presentations. Mentioning a high CSAT score reinforces the confidence and appeal of your products or services.
You can also use positive verbatims in your marketing campaigns. By citing positive feedback on your website or in your advertising, you use this real-world feedback as testimony to the quality of your customer service. This becomes a powerful argument for attracting new customers and maximizing your revenues.
How can I improve my CSAT score?
To improve your CSAT score, you need to adopt a methodical approach. Here are some strategies for improving your score:
- Gather feedback: Encourage your customers to give feedback on a regular basis. Use post-purchase surveys by e-mail, telephone or live to understand their level of satisfaction and identify areas for improvement.
- Analyze results: Examine survey results carefully for trends. Take particular note of negative or recurring aspects that require your attention.
- Train staff: Make sure your team is well trained to respond to customer needs and concerns. The ability to solve problems quickly and effectively can significantly improve your CSAT score.
- Continuous product improvement: Solicit product feedback to understand weak points, and make improvements based on customer feedback. A product that better meets consumer expectations generally leads to a higher satisfaction rate.
- Transparent communication: Always be transparent with your customers. Inform them of any changes or obstacles encountered and how you plan to resolve them.
How can Batvoice help you?
Batvoice 's Artificial Intelligence analyzes exchanges between agents and customers to extract key information on customer satisfaction.
Our solution integrates the CSAT score obtained through third-party solutions immediately after each customer service interaction. Thanks to theanalysis of CSAT and customer verbatims during calls, Batvoice is able to align the answers to the questionnaire with the mood of the call.
In the event of a negative score or strong anger detected during the call, Batvoice offers agents immediate corrective action to resolve the customer's dissatisfaction.
By analyzing the customer's voice, our technology can pinpoint recurring words in their vocabulary and identify the call's strong points. This makes it easier to classify calls by subject and identify recurring issues linked to each theme.
