Customers hardly let you know that they had a bad experience. They’ll instead churn or worse, stop people in their network from patronizing your business.
To prevent this, you must proactively analyze customers’ sentiments after every core interaction. One of the best ways to do this is to calculate your customer satisfaction score.
In this article, we’ll show you how to collect customer satisfaction data and analyze this information to get your average CSAT score. We’ll also share some tips for improving low CSAT and creating better experiences for your customers.
Skip ahead:
- What is customer satisfaction score?
- How to collect customer satisfaction score data
- How to calculate CSAT
- How to interpret your customer satisfaction score
- Why does the average customer satisfaction score differ per industry?
- 3 reasons why your customer satisfaction score is low
- How to improve your customer satisfaction score
- Tools for collecting customer satisfaction data
- CSAT alternatives
- Customer satisfaction is a continuous process
- CSAT FAQs
What is customer satisfaction score?
Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is a CX metric that measures how pleased your customers are with a specific experience — whether that’s using your service or placing an order for your product online.
How to collect customer satisfaction score data
To know how satisfied your customers are with their experiences, you need to administer a customer satisfaction survey that looks like this:
How satisfied are you with this experience?
- Very satisfied
- Somewhat satisfied
- Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied
- Dissatisfied
- Very dissatisfied
Alternatively, you can administer a rating scale survey where customers use numbers or emojis to rate their level of satisfaction.
What matters is that you ask one question and provide close-ended options. For example, your survey questions shouldn’t look like this: Explain how satisfied you are with your experience in 100 words.
Once you’ve collected all the responses, the next task is categorizing them into positive and negative.
The satisfied and very satisfied responses are positive, while the others are negative. Neutral responses, that is, ‘neither satisfied nor dissatisfied,’ fall into the negative category because these customers are indifferent about the experience. You still need to impress them.
Having categorized the survey results categorization, the next step is to calculate your customer satisfaction score.
Related: Download our customer satisfaction survey template to speed up data collection.
How to calculate CSAT
The CSAT formula is as follows:
CSAT = (Number of positive responses ÷ Total number of responses) x 100
Let’s see how this pans out in real time.
Suppose you collected 150 CSAT survey responses, and 75 of them are positive. In that case, your customer satisfaction score is: (75 ÷ 150) x 100 = 50%. In other words, only 50% of your customers are happy with their experience at your company.
How to interpret your customer satisfaction score
Whether your customer satisfaction score is good or bad depends on the CSAT benchmark for your industry.
If your industry benchmark is 60 and your CSAT is 65, then it’s a good score. On the flip side, if 70 is the CSAT benchmark and your score is 65, then you’re below the average and need to improve.
CSAT industry benchmark
Here’s a quick look at the average customer satisfaction scores for different industries per Freshwork’s Customer Happiness Report.
Industry | Average CSAT |
| Telecommunications | 42% |
| Retail | 43% |
| Real Estate | 45% |
| Transportation | 46% |
| Pharma and Biotech | 50% |
| Education | 53% |
| Consumer Products | 64% |
| Banks | 71% |
| Consumer Services | 73% |
| Leisure, Sports and Recreation | 74% |
| Electronics | 74% |
| Media | 77% |
| Financial Services | 77% |
| Food and Beverage | 79% |
| Computer Software | 80% |
| Insurance | 81% |
| Healthcare | 83% |
| Civic, Non-Profit | 86% |
| Government | 87% |
| Industrial Manufacturing and Services | 89% |
| Computer Hardware | 89% |
Why does the average customer satisfaction score differ per industry?
Industry and product complexity and technology integration are the main factors that influence CSAT per industry.
Let’s discuss them further.
Industry and product complexity
The simpler the product and industry, the easier it is to deliver a stellar customer experience.
For example, high-stakes industries like Pharma and Biotech have strict regulatory requirements. They set up complex processes that can affect the customer experience to meet these requirements. Consider this scenario: A customer requires certain information, but the company needs clearance from the regulatory body to provide it — so the customer ends up waiting for a long time.
It’s different for low-stakes industries like leisure and recreation. For instance, the customer can drop a message on Instagram and receive immediate feedback from a restaurant or resort. This creates a smoother experience that positively impacts satisfaction.
Technology integration
The tech touch industries, that is, those that rely almost entirely on tech for customer success operations, are more likely to have high customer satisfaction scores.
Technical tools limit or eliminate bottlenecks that negatively impact customer satisfaction. For example, integrating chatbots into your website speeds up customer communication. Similarly, customer feedback tools like Custify and AskNicely, let you evaluate customer sentiments in real-time.
On the flip side, high-touch industries like real estate might have lower CSATs because they depend heavily on humans to deliver top-notch customer experiences. Humans are unpredictable; our moods and behaviors change often, impacting how we treat others.
Let’s say a realtor had a heated argument with their boss before going for a property exhibition. In that case, they might be edgy throughout the day and deliver a poor experience to the customer.
3 reasons why your customer satisfaction score is low
Your CSAT might be significantly lower than your industry average for one or more of these reasons:
Poor user experience
You might have a stellar customer success team. But if your product is hard to use, it will ruin the customer experience and cause low satisfaction.
Your customer success team can’t fix things like a buggy website or a complicated web app. Even if your CS team is super responsive, customers will eventually get tired of reaching out to them every time for the same problem.
Inefficient communication
There are two issues here:
Long response time
The longer a customer waits for a response, the less satisfied they will be.
Data from Dialpad shows that if a customer’s call is placed on hold for more than 15 minutes, their satisfaction drops to 45%. On the flip side, customers with a three-minute or less hold time have an 80% satisfaction score.
Unresponsiveness
Picture this: You send a complaint via email to a business but no one responds. The next day, you send a follow-up email, and it’s crickets. You send a DM on X and also tag them on your social posts. Still, nothing.
Describing this scenario is already exhausting, let alone experiencing it first-hand. No one enjoys being ignored — much less a customer. Unresponsiveness not only prolongs the issue, costing the customer time and money, but also indicates that you do not value them.
Poor personalization
Customers expect businesses to understand their needs and preferences and provide personalized experiences. When businesses fail to do so, customers feel undervalued and unimportant, which negatively impacts satisfaction.
For instance, if a customer receives irrelevant product recommendations or promotional emails, they may feel like the business doesn’t understand their interests or needs. Similarly, it can be frustrating and time-consuming if a customer has to repeat their information or preferences every time they interact with a business.
How to improve your customer satisfaction score
First, you need to know the exact reason your customers are dissatisfied with their experience. To do this, send a follow-up email or survey to people who picked neutral and negative responses to find out why they chose those answers.
Based on their feedback, you can do one or more of these things to improve customer satisfaction:
Simplify user experience
Make it as easy as possible for customers to use your product or service. They should not require skills beyond their current knowledge and experience to understand how your product works.
The exact user experience aspects to pay attention to depend on your product structure. But you can start with the following:
- Shorten the customer onboarding process so that customers get value from your product quickly. For example, instead of asking customers to complete user profiles before using your product, let them complete their profiles at a later time.
- Make your product design accessible. Accessibility lets people with disabilities understand and use your product. For example, provide alternative text for non-text content such as images, charts, and graphs. This helps users with visual impairments understand the content through screen readers.
- Implement automated guided tours and tutorials to help users understand key features and functionalities. Provide tooltips or interactive elements to guide users through the platform.
Personalize experiences
Personalization not only improves satisfaction but also increases revenue and retention. More than 50% of participants in Segment’s State of Personalization survey said they would repeatedly buy from a brand that personalizes their experiences.
So how do you deliver personalized experiences at scale? Some ideas to try:
- Ensure that customers have the same experience no matter how or where they interact with your brands. A customer who reaches out to you via live chat should enjoy the same experience when they contact you on Instagram or X.
- Address customers by their names and use data-driven insights to recommend products or services that align with their preferences or previous purchases.
- Offer personalized customer support. For example, you can assign a dedicated support person and account manager to attend to customer requests proactively.
Shorten customer response time
Automate redundant processes to help you respond to customer inquiries and complaints faster. For example, a website chatbot can provide instant responses to customer queries, resolve simple issues, and route complex ones to a human.
Another way to shorten customer response time is to build out self-help resources like product tutorials and knowledge base articles. These resources will help customers resolve simple issues independently instead of reaching out to your team every time they encounter a challenge.
Your customers love it, too. Nearly 70% of respondents in a Nuance Enterprise survey said they’d rather use self-service channels than speak with a customer support agent.
Tools for collecting customer satisfaction data
Here’s a rundown of tools that can help you gather and analyze customer satisfaction data quickly.
Surveys and questionnaires
- Google Forms is a Google Workspace application that lets you create customized customer satisfaction surveys for free.
- Typeform lets you create interactive and user-friendly surveys. Instead of seeing all the questions at once, users answer one question after the other — just like in a face-to-face conversation.
Customer feedback software
- Zendesk lets you create and embed customer feedback forms into your website, email, and mobile applications. It also helps you analyze and make sense of the feedback you collect. For example, you can view feedback reports that show the most common issues your customers reported, as well as feedback sentiments — that is, positive, negative, or neutral.
- Hubspot’s customer feedback software lets you collect real-time insights about customer experiences. After gathering feedback data, you can share it with your team for visibility or use the in-app analytics tools to make sense of your data.
Social media monitoring tools
- Sprout Social lets you collect feedback from people who interact with your social accounts. All you need to do is set up a customer feedback survey in your Sprout Social account, and the app will send automatic feedback forms to customers after they interact with your brand on social media.
- Brandwatch allows you to track brand mentions and customer sentiment across social platforms. While it doesn’t provide quantitative customer feedback, it’s a great way to track what people are saying about your brand online in real-time.
In-app feedback tools
- Instabug is a powerful tool for collecting customer feedback, bug reports, and feature requests directly from your mobile app. It provides an in-app feedback and bug-reporting system that allows users to quickly and easily report issues or provide suggestions without having to leave the app.
All feedback is collected in a central dashboard, which allows you to manage and prioritize issues. You can also assign issues to specific team members and track their progress.
- UserVoice allows businesses to create customizable feedback forms that can be embedded in their website or mobile app. These forms can be used to collect feedback from customers, including feature requests, bug reports, and general experience feedback.
CSAT alternatives
Customer behavior is dynamic. So, it makes sense that there are multiple ways to track whether or not customers are satisfied with their experience with your business.
Here are five other customer evaluation metrics you should track to get well-rounded feedback on customers’ perceptions of your brand.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric that measures customer loyalty towards your brand or organization. It helps you to understand if your customers are likely to recommend your product or service to their friends, family, or colleagues.
NPS surveys usually ask customers how likely they are to recommend your product or service on a scale of 0 to 10. Based on their response, customers are classified into three categories – Promoters (9-10), Passives (7-8), and Detractors (0-6). The NPS score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
Customer Effort Score (CES) measures the amount of effort a customer has to put in to complete a task or resolve an issue. It details how easy or difficult it is for your customers to interact with your brand.
To gather CES data, you need to administer a single-question survey that asks customers to rate the level of effort they had to put in to complete a task on a scale of 1 to 5. The lower the score, the easier it was for the customer to complete the task.
First Contact Resolution (FCR)
First Contact Resolution (FCR) measures the percentage of customer issues that were resolved in the first interaction. It’s a great way to track your customer success team’s efficiency and how satisfied your customers are with the resolution.
A high FCR score indicates that your customers are getting their issues resolved quickly and efficiently, leading to higher customer satisfaction.
Customer Retention Rate (CRR)
Customer Retention Rate (CRR) measures the percentage of customers who continue to use your product or service over a given period. It shows how loyal your customers are and how likely they are to continue using your product or service.
Churn Rate (CR)
Churn Rate (CR) measures the percentage of customers who stop using your product or service over a given period. It helps you to understand how many customers you are losing and why they are leaving.
A high CR score indicates that you are losing customers at a high rate, which can negatively impact your revenue and growth.
Customer satisfaction is a continuous process
Customer satisfaction isn’t a one-and-done activity. Your customers may have given you a 10/10 satisfaction score at the beginning of the year, but they might not have the same sentiment in three or six months.
That’s why you need to conduct CSAT surveys regularly. Consider building CSAT data collection into your business’s core processes like in-app customer interactions and product usage. Then analyze the data at regular intervals to know what’s working and what needs to be improved.
That’s the sure-fire way to deliver stellar customer experiences at scale.
CSAT FAQs
Find answers to common customer satisfaction score questions.
What does CSAT stand for?
CSAT stands for Customer Satisfaction Score. It measures how happy customers are with a business’s product or service.
What is the ideal customer satisfaction score for businesses?
The ideal CSAT depends on the industry. Insurance, for example, has a 73% CSAT benchmark. On the other hand, the ideal customer satisfaction score for e-commerce businesses is 80%.
How often should companies measure CSAT?
You should measure your business’s CSAT at least twice a year to know how well your product or service meets the needs of your customers. You can send out regular CSAT surveys and analyze the results at the middle and end of the year.
How does CSAT differ from Net Promoter Score (NPS)?
Net Promoter Score measures customer loyalty, while CSAT measures customer satisfaction.
NPS tracks how likely customers are to buy from you repeatedly and also recommends your brand to people in their network. On the flip side, CSAT measures how satisfied your customers are with your product or services.
Both metrics help you to gauge the quality of your customer experience delivery.
How is CSAT measured?
CSAT is measured in percentage. To calculate your customer satisfaction score, divide your total number of positive reviews by the total number of reviews and multiply the result by 100.
Say you have 40 positive reviews out of 50 total feedback; your CSAT is: (40 ÷ 50) x 100 = 80%.
