Let’s get the most important thing out of the way first: What is CSAT?
CSAT stands for Customer Satisfaction and it’s a way to measure just that: how satisfied your customers are with your overall brand. Well, it used to be only the overall satisfaction, because we didn’t have the tools and technology to get more information.
But now (drumroll), you’re able to measure your customer’s satisfaction at every touchpoint of their customer journey, e.g. after using the search function, at/after checkout, after delivery, after returning items, etc.
We use CSAT to retain customers, improve our customer experience and improve customer loyalty.
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Two kinds of CSAT questions:
Generally, we talk about two different kinds of CSATs: Transactional CSAT and Relationship CSAT. Let’s go through them real quick:
Transactional CSAT – and what questions to ask:
Transactional CSATs are the ‘live’ answers you get from your customers as they move through their customer journey. These are very valuable, because you get insight into every touchpoint, meaning that you can instantly detect if someone is dissatisfied and act on it.
The point of these questions is to measure the customers’ satisfaction with a particular part of the transaction, i.e. the customer journey.
Three examples of questions:
- Did you find what you were looking for? (After using the search function – yes/no)
- Are you satisfied with the way our agent handled your inquiry? (after contact with agent/customer support – 1-5 or 1-10)
- How did you like our return policy? (after returning item – 1-5 or 1-10)
Generally, it is important to ask easily-understood and precise questions that relate directly to the experience the customer has just had with your company. Questions can easily be misunderstood because of grammar or word-choice, so double check your work and maybe run it through your office neighbor.
Relationship CSAT:
This kind of CSAT is often a part of a bigger questionnaire – as opposed to the Transactional CSAT. These kinds of surveys will provide you with a more general view of your customers’ satisfaction. This means that you can put multiple questions covering multiple subjects in one questionnaire and thereby get an overall view of your support, customer experience, check-out process, etc.
Three examples of questions
- Overall, how easy-to-use did you find our website?
- Based on your latest experience with our brand, how likely are you to buy from us again?
- What would you change about our service? (Qualitative. Give them the freedom to write)
The last open-ended question is often used as a extra question to finish off a questionnaire, but you can also include an NPS question. But again, keep the wording as simple as possible to avoid misunderstandings!
Which scale to use
The Likert Scale is the one we most commonly use when working with questionnaires – even professional researchers use this.
When responding to a Likert item, respondents specify their level of agreement or disagreement on a symmetric agree-disagree scale for a series of statements. Thus, the range captures the intensity of their feelings for a given item.
For example:
- Strongly disagree
- Disagree
- Neither agree nor disagree
- Agree
- Strongly agree
This is just one way of using the Likert scale, but psychometric research has found the 5-point scale to be best practice.
You can also use the 1-10 scale, but using an odd-numbered scale gives your customers the ability to pick a neutral answer, yet it also makes it more likely that they will pick a non-neutral answer, which will inevitably give you more information. The 1-10 scale is often used in NPS questions, though, but here it makes more sense because you can then divide your customers into detractors, passives, and promoters – and then use that information to get promoters to act on their excitement for your brand.
The last kind of scale, I’ll mention is the yes/no-scale. This dichotomous scale is great when you want a fast answer and you don’t really need a lot of nuances. For example when you want to know whether or not your customer is generally satisfied with your customer support. It’s easy to relate to a question, such as: “Are you satisfied with our customer support”, and if the customer says no you can reach out to them to find out what you did wrong.
How do you calculate the CSAT score?
The CSAT score is calculated in percentages. For example, if you ask the question “Overall, how did you like our return policy?”, and your customers then answer on a scale from 1-5, you calculate the overall CSAT score by taking the number of satisfied customers (those who have answered 4 or 5 – 5 being the most satisfied) and dividing it by the total number of answers. Then you take that number and multiply by 100. Then you have the overall CSAT score.
Like this:
(number of 4/5 answers / total number of answers)*100
For example:
(89/103)*100=86,4%
As a rule of thumb, if you get over 80%, you’ve got it going pretty good!
Who we recommend:
We, ourselves, use Surveypal when measuring our CSAT and every other kind of feedback. There are other services out there, but Surveypal makes it possible to integrate with three of the biggest customer service systems; Zendesk, Salesforce, and ServiceNow (we use Zendesk – surprise surprise).
This means that you can supercharge and automate the process of collecting customer feedback in the helpdesk/ticketing system you use and proactively manage the customer experience.
What’s not to like? It’s another way to boost your omnichannel approach and stop wasting precious time and money silo-thinking.
Conclusion:
CSAT is short for Customer Satisfaction, and we distinguish – generally – between two kinds of CSATs: Transactional CSAT and Relationship CSAT.
Transactional CSATs are the simple questions you ask your customers right after they interact with a part of your company (e.g. support, search function, check-out). Relationship CSATs are more comprehensive and will often include an NPS.
If your CSAT score is over 80%, you are pretty good at what you do! But you should take a closer look at the customers who were not satisfied (maybe even call them up). This should help you make even more of your customers become loyal customers and improve the overall customer experience.