AI Evaluation Metrics - User Satisfaction (CSAT)
Definition:
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) measures how satisfied users are with the AI chatbot’s responses, typically collected via feedback surveys or ratings.
Guide for Compliance Team and Engineers:
Purpose:
Gauge how well the AI meets user expectations, especially regarding clarity, helpfulness, and trustworthiness of health advice and product recommendations.
For Compliance Team:
Set Satisfaction Goals: Define target satisfaction levels (e.g., ≥85% for wellness, ≥90% for pharmacies).
Feedback Channels: Implement easy-to-use feedback mechanisms within the chatbot for real-time user input.
Analyze Feedback: Regularly review feedback to identify common issues, dissatisfaction drivers, and improvement opportunities.
Action Plans: Work with product teams to prioritize fixes and feature enhancements based on user satisfaction data.
Reporting: Include CSAT metrics in compliance and performance reports.
For Engineers:
Feedback Integration: Design chatbot flows to prompt for and capture user satisfaction ratings seamlessly.
Sentiment Analysis: Use NLP techniques to analyze qualitative feedback for sentiment and recurring themes.
Rapid Iteration: Quickly incorporate feedback into model updates or UI improvements.
Error Handling: Implement graceful recovery paths when the chatbot fails or users express frustration.
A/B Testing: Experiment with different response styles or explanations to improve satisfaction.
A comprehensive guide on CSAT, including how to measure it and how it stacks up against other CX metrics.
The Gist
Top CX metric. CSAT measures customer satisfaction, and its the most-used metric by customer experience professionals.
CSAT surveys. Surveys deployed at key moments help organizations determine how satisfied a customer is with an interaction.
CSAT measurement. You can calculate your CSAT score with a simple equation and see how it compares to industry benchmarks.
Editor’s Note: The article has been updated to include new data and information. The original content was authored by Dom Nicastro.
In the age of social media, viral reviews and user-generated content, consumer power is at an all-time high. It’s time for businesses to leverage customer feedback to improve CX, inspire brand loyalty and increase profitability. And who better to provide input on how to improve CX than the people who spend money with your company?
Gathering CX metrics like CSAT provides decision-makers with quantitative and qualitative actionable data at key interaction points.
What does CSAT stand for and how can you calculate customer satisfaction? We'll answer those questions (and more) in this comprehensive guide.
What Is CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score)?
What is CSAT? The customer satisfaction score, also called CSAT, measures how happy a customer is with a product, service, customer service interactions or any other customer experience. This metric is derived from customer satisfaction surveys that ask a question like: How satisfied are you with the response from our customer support team?
You can deploy a customer satisfaction survey at any point along your customer’s journey to gain insight into how happy they are with your brand.
When it comes to the CSAT survey, you can ask the customer to choose a numerical score, for example: between 1 and 10. Or, if you're looking for more qualitative data, you can use verbal indicators, like "very satisfied" or "unsatisfied." You can also go with international symbols like smiley faces or stars.
Whether you use numbers, words or symbols, the scoring process is the same.
Related Article: 11 Top Customer Service Metrics to Measure
How Do You Measure CSAT?
To measure CSAT, first you'll need to collect customer feedback. To do so, you might ask a question like: How would you rate the helpfulness of our customer service representatives?
Then, those who respond can pick from a numbered rating scale, such as 1 to 5:
Very dissatisfied
Dissatisfied
Neutral
Satisfied
Very Satisfied
How to Calculate CSAT Scores
Once you've collected your customer feedback, it's time to figure out your CSAT score calculation.
If 100 people took your CSAT survey, and 80 gave you a rating of, that would give you a CSAT rating of 80. Or, when more commonly expressed as a percentage: 80%.
When to Use CSAT Surveys
CSAT surveys are a great way to tap into the levels of customer happiness. But when is the best time to use them?
Customers might interact with your brand in hundreds of ways: email, social media, your website, on the phone, etc. It's important to measure how satisfied customers are at the most useful moments.
Some optimal times to survey customers include:
After a customer interaction, such as a customer support call, chat session or in-store visit.
Post-purchase, after the customer buys a product or service.
Following an event, including workshops or training sessions.
At regular intervals, such as for subscription-based services.
After certain milestones, for ongoing services like IT, consulting or education.
An alternative method is to try to capture the entire customer lifecycle instead of single interactions. Joseph Ansanelli, co-founder and CEO of Gladly, highlighted the importance of taking a holistic approach to customer experience.
With CX involving numerous interactions across multiple channels, he said, “Surveying a customer after one of these can lead to false results. This is especially true if the issue they called about hasn’t yet been resolved. Triggering the survey once the entire conversation has been closed is a much more effective way to gauge true customer sentiment.”
What Is a Good CSAT Score?
Expectations vary across industries, but a good customer satisfaction score usually falls between 75% and 85%. A score of 75% represents four in five customers giving you a positive score as opposed to neutral or negative.
Graph Generated With ChatGPT
Let’s take a look at the benchmarks and the expected customer satisfaction scores by industry, using data from the American Customer Satisfaction Index:
The Pros and Cons of Measuring CSAT
Many businesses use CSAT metrics as a key performance indicator to measure overall satisfaction and customer success.
According to CMSWire's State of Digital Customer Experience report, CSAT is the most-used measure of digital CX, followed by net promoter score (NPS) and customer retention rate. And the percentage of organizations using CSAT scores has increased by 7% over the last year.
The Pros of CSAT
Customer satisfaction score pros include:
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You Learn About Your Customers
If your business meets customer expectations most of the time, you’re more likely to retain customers.
By gathering CSAT feedback at key touchpoints, you learn how effectively you’re meeting expectations. Over time, you’ll gather valuable feedback highlighting any pain points or bottlenecks in the customer journey. The insights you gain will also help you understand what your customers want and expect.
You might learn that your customers value:
A robust and easy-to-find privacy policy that focuses on transparency
Regular communication about product deals and new offerings via email
Educational content that focuses on understanding the product or industry space
A community forum where they can connect with other customers
You Can Advertise Your CSAT Score
Another benefit to measuring customer satisfaction is that you can publish great results to set yourself apart from competitors. Have a great score that’s higher than the industry average and exceeds customer satisfaction benchmarks? Have you listened to customer feedback and improved your score over the past year or two? Tell people about it.
If you share your high scores, you’ll assure potential customers that post-purchase customer care is fast and high-quality.
You Can Improve the Customer Experience
A CSAT score isn’t there to make you feel bad about your brand or discipline your team. The point of gathering feedback is to make tangible improvements to your business that affect your customer satisfaction levels. If you can improve customer satisfaction, you can boost your entire customer experience program.
“Vendors or service providers often have a predetermined definition of what a satisfied customer looks like," said Nate Masterson, CEO of Maple Holistics. "The cost of having your own standards can be detrimental to your business because you can’t account for the problems you’re blind to. It’s obviously important to have standards, but you should be more concerned with your customers’ expectations.”
You Can Reduce Customer Churn
It’s a fact you’ve probably heard time and again: acquiring new customers is more expensive than retaining the ones you already have. To be more specific, it’s five to 25 times more expensive to attract new customers than hold onto existing ones, according to Harvard Business Review.
But when you have hundreds, thousands or millions of customers, it can be hard to determine who’s had a negative experience and why. Survey data can help you identify unhappy customers before they churn. This provides a unique opportunity to make amends and win back those happy customers.
If you can turn an unhappy customer into a satisfied one, there are a lot of benefits. Research from Bain & Company shows that increasing retention rates by just 5% can boost profits by 25% to 95%.
You Can Increase Customer Loyalty
Customer loyalty is when a consumer is inclined to do repeat business with your company. And one big driver of loyalty? Customer experience. Brands that can deliver exceptional experiences that lead to satisfied customers can ensure that customers keep coming back.
The customer satisfaction score will tell you how your brand is faring in terms of delivering these great experiences, and if there are ways you can inspired increased customer loyalty. Other metrics you can use to measure levels of customer engagement and retention — significant factors in loyalty — are average order value and customer lifetime value.
The Cons of CSAT
Customer satisfaction score cons include:
Limited Scope of Feedback
A customer satisfaction survey typically focuses on specific transactions or interactions, which may not provide a comprehensive view of the overall customer experience. It captures immediate reactions rather than long-term satisfaction or loyalty, which can be more telling of your business's performance.
Susceptible to Extremes
Your CSAT score can be disproportionately influenced by very negative or very positive experiences, potentially skewing your understanding of general customer sentiment. Customers who have extreme experiences are more likely to respond to surveys, which can lead to biased results.
Response Bias
Customers may respond to a CSAT survey in a way they think is expected, or they might not provide honest feedback due to perceived repercussions or a lack of anonymity. This can make it difficult to gather accurate data.
Potential for Survey Fatigue
Over-surveying customers can lead to survey fatigue, where customers get tired of answering surveys and either do not respond or do not engage thoughtfully with the questions. This reduces the quality and reliability of the customer insights you receive.
Cost and Resource Intensive
Designing, administering and analyzing CSAT surveys can be costly and time-consuming. Resources spent on frequent survey cycles could potentially be redirected to other customer experience or improvement initiatives.
Related Article: What Is Customer Effort Score (CES)? And How to Measure It
What Can You Measure With a CSAT Survey?
CSAT surveys offer a simple way to measure customer satisfaction metrics and customer experience across various service areas. You can deploy these surveys at various customer lifecycle moments to determine:
The agent's knowledge and expertise
The agent's understanding of the issue
The agent's/company's level of communication
The agent's level of professionalism
The agent's/company's responsiveness
The effectiveness of resolution
What's the Difference Between CSAT, NPS and CES?
CSAT measures how satisfied a customer is with a specific interaction. Positive responses indicate you're doing something right while negative feedback means something's gone astray.
The net promoter score (NPS), on the other hand, is a growth indicator — it measures how likely a customer is to recommend your brand. Like CSAT, NPS surveys are short and deployed at key touchpoints in the customer lifecycle.
The customer effort score (CES) quantifies how easy customers find it to interact with your brand. These surveys are used right after an interaction with customer support, or immediately after a purchase.
Can You Measure CSAT in Real-Time?
When feedback is batched and shared with agents weekly, its effectiveness in improving customer satisfaction levels is limited, explained Gladly's Ansanelli. However, if you can integrate that feedback into the service experience — allowing employees to see the feedback results of an interaction in real-time — agents can use that information to inform future conversations.
This process also helps agents who engage with the same customer in the future, added Ansanelli. “If the last survey yielded a low-star rating, they can start the conversation by acknowledging it.” This proactive, honest approach can improve customer loyalty and boosts your brand’s reputation.
Where Does AI Fit Into CSAT?
Brian Slepko, SVP of global service delivery for Rimini Street, has leveraged artificial intelligence to generate CSAT scores. Automated CSAT surveys provide better support to internal teams on the front lines with clients and reduce pressure on the workforce by improving customer satisfaction measurements.
“With our AI components, each with a specific function as it relates to customer service, we are now able to solve support issues more quickly, which in turn drives customer satisfaction,” he said.
At his company, said Slepko, the use of AI has changed their approach to problem-solving for clients. Now, CX teams can use this information to proactively solve problems. “We still reach out to every client with a lower than average score to understand what happened and of course correct as needed. But our ideal state is to correct any systematic problems before they actually happen in the first place.”
CSAT and Customer Experience Matter More Than Ever
Research shows that if you give customers a great experience, they'll buy more, be more loyal to your brand and share their positive experiences with their friends. And one great way to determine if you're meeting the goal of excellent CX is the customer satisfaction score.
Customer satisfaction metrics help you determine what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong, allowing you to focus your efforts on the areas that matter most. It's just one key in becoming a customer-centric business that people rave about.