Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
A metric measuring how well products or services meet customer expectations at specific touchpoints.
What is Customer Satisfaction?
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) measures how satisfied customers are with a specific interaction, feature, or experience. Unlike NPS (which measures overall loyalty), CSAT focuses on satisfaction with particular touchpoints: support interaction, feature usage, onboarding experience, checkout process. Typically measured with the question 'How satisfied were you with [experience]?' on a 1-5 or 1-7 scale. CSAT score is calculated as percentage of customers who responded 4-5 (satisfied/very satisfied) out of total responses.
Why It Matters
CSAT provides specific, actionable feedback on discrete experiences rather than overall sentiment. It helps identify which touchpoints delight customers and which create friction. High CSAT scores indicate well-designed experiences; low scores signal areas needing improvement. CSAT is particularly valuable for support teams (measuring support interaction quality), product teams (assessing feature satisfaction), and operations teams (evaluating process efficiency). Tracking CSAT over time shows whether improvements are working.
How to Use CSAT Effectively
Deploy CSAT surveys immediately after specific experiences while they're fresh: post-support ticket resolution, after feature usage, following onboarding, after purchase. Keep surveys very short (1-2 questions maximum). Ask both rating question and optional open-ended 'Why?' question. Set target CSAT thresholds and investigate when scores fall below. Segment CSAT by customer type, experience type, or team handling interaction. Share results with teams responsible for the experience. Use low CSAT responses to identify coaching opportunities or process improvements. Track trends—are scores improving?
Concrete Examples
A SaaS company sends CSAT surveys after support tickets are closed. They achieve 88% CSAT overall but notice certain issue types score 60% CSAT. Investigation reveals these issues require multiple back-and-forth exchanges. They create better documentation and self-service resources, improving CSAT to 82% while reducing ticket volume. An e-commerce platform measures checkout CSAT and discovers mobile checkout scores 15 points lower than desktop—they redesign mobile checkout UI, closing the gap. A B2B vendor surveys CSAT post-implementation and uses responses to identify which implementation consultants achieve highest satisfaction, using them to train others.
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