Customer Satisfaction Rating (CSAT)

What is customer satisfaction (CSAT)?

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is a popular key performance indicator that tracks customer satisfaction. The process involves a survey question or a set of questions. 

The customers answer by indicating their level of satisfaction. The most popular scale is 1 to 10, with 1 being the least satisfied and 10 as the most satisfying level.

The result gives a business the necessary output whether or not to improve customer service right there and then. However, the possible ambiguity might be a disadvantage, especially if a customer is dissatisfied with the service.

Why is CSAT important?

CSAT scores allow companies to look into how their customer feels in each interaction with sales agents. CSAT provides business leaders with two important pieces of information — a detailed insight into every touchpoint of the customer journey and the overall customer experience.

Customer satisfaction scores enable businesses to determine the pain points in their service that impacts the customer journey. Addressing all these pain points and correcting them helps identify unhappy customers and turn them into happy customers, which in turn, increases the customer lifetime value over time.

Buyers are also more likely to become repeat customers — and eventually, become loyal clients — if they have experienced an excellent customer experience in a particular business.

Moreover, because CSAT is measured through doing a customer satisfaction survey, as well as gathering feedback and online reviews, sales agents can do a deep dive into their customer base. This means that they now have access and the capacity to understand what their clients need and want from any business.

How to calculate CSAT?

Measuring CSAT is pretty straightforward.

All you have to do is add the positive responses together, divide them by the total number of responses collected,  then multiply by 100. The outcome leaves you with the overall percentage of customer satisfaction in your business.

For example, if 50 people took part in your customer survey and 30 of them gave positive feedback — your CSAT score would then be 60%.

See here:

(30 positive responses / 50 total responses = .60 x 100 = 60%)

This indicates that while the majority of your clients are satisfied with your service, you can still improve it to better serve your customers.

The best time for measuring customer satisfaction is post-sales. These times are especially crucial for repeat and new customers as the experience is still fresh in their minds.

What is a good CSAT score?

Now that your customer satisfaction score, the next thing to do is determine if it is good enough to guarantee excellent customer service. Is your numerical score enough to gain new customers and improve the overall customer lifecycle?

While every industry has different standards for CSAT scores, an excellent rate usually falls between 75% to 80%. Reaching this customer satisfaction rate means that three out of every four buyers had a positive experience with your brand.

While most companies would love to see 100% satisfaction in their services, that is rarely the case. Additionally, the pandemic has certainly affected customer happiness when purchasing a product or service.

Each buyer has their own opinions and standards. Having customer conversations, hearing their responses, and gauging customer happiness ton a product or service can help companies create new strategies that could improve customer satisfaction.

CSAT in outsourcing

Customer satisfaction score might be the simplest metric but it’s a powerful tool for all businesses. It encompasses the whole customer journey and helps businesses determine the things that they should improve on to gain customer loyalty.

Measuring customer satisfaction is quick and easy. You add up all the ratings and divide the total score by the number of respondents. Most likely, you’ll get a percentage.

Get your customer satisfaction score a notch higher by outsourcing your customer service team. Check out Outsource Accelerator’s extensive list of outsourcing companies in the Philippines.

Strengthening customer loyalty with CSAT

Customer loyalty refers to buyers who always go back to your brand to do repeat business. It is usually brought on by customer satisfaction, positive customer experiences, and the overall value of the goods or services a customer receives from a business.

A company’s CSAT score evaluates the services of different brands and determines if your company is able to retain customers instead of losing them to competitors. It also brings customer feedback so that businesses can strengthen their services.

It could be hard for business owners or sales representatives to identify unhappy customers from satisfied customers. CSAT surveys assist in detecting customer satisfaction at the earliest stage of the customer lifecycle.

They allow companies to amend poor customer service and improve it before experiencing the worst-case scenario — customer churn.

Remember, customer expectations for a possible repeat business rather than lose them to competing brands. Trust is a critical part of any business relationship, but finding the right strategies to improve it — along with your customer satisfaction — can be challenging.

There is more than one side to the customer satisfaction equation. The key to improving customer satisfaction is a healthy balance between understanding and improving performance internally while doing the same with customers externally.

Tips to improve your CSAT scores

There are a couple of tricks that you can use to improve your CSAT score and ensure excellent customer interaction all the time. Here are some of them:

Request customer feedback

The easiest way to gauge your market’s reaction to your products or services is to ask them to rate their customer experience. This can be done by handing out customer satisfaction surveys to post-calls or asking them for an online review.

Gathering customer feedback will help you determine the issues in your service and address it quickly so that you wouldn’t lose the trust of your clients.

Meet customer expectations

Customers usually expect to gain whatever good things you have said about your business. So, to keep them satisfied, it is important for your whole team to work hard in meeting those expectations.

For example, if you say that your customer support call center is open 24 hours, then you have to put some of your staff on standby at all times for any inbound calls. If you advertise that there is a promo for a specific product, then you have to uphold for every buyer.

Additionally, it is important to remain transparent with your consumers. From the time that they are still prospective buyers, you have to make sure that they already know what to expect from your brand and the policies that they will be agreeing with as paying customers.

Provide proactive customer service

If you want to boost customer satisfaction, you have to make sure first that you have a dedicated contact center for your clients. This contact must be personal, timely, and always pertinent to the user.

Reduce inbound calls in call centers as they increase agent effectiveness. By offering customer service proactively you can show the customer that good support does not only benefit the business.

CSAT vs NPS vs CES

CSAT is not the only key performance indicator that measures customer satisfaction. Businesses also look into their net promoter score (NPS) and customer effort score (CES) to capture customer feedback and measure customer loyalty.

The net promoter score determines the likelihood of customers recommending your business to other consumers. The higher your NPS score is, the bigger chance there is for brand recognition. NPS scores are usually measured using a 1-10 rating system.

CES, meanwhile, measures customer sentiment on how well they have used your products or services. The CES surveys aim to determine the ease or difficulty of customers deciding on purchasing your products.