Customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys reveal customer satisfaction and provide businesses with valuable, direct customer feedback. Essentially, these surveys show you where your business excels and where it falls short of expectations.
A high customer satisfaction score is a reward in itself: It is proof that a business is good at what it’s doing. However, the data in a client satisfaction survey holds even greater value because it offers insights into how to improve customer experience and nurture client life cycles.
This article talks about CSAT scores and the importance of CSAT surveys. It also delves into the insights obtained from these surveys and the benefits your business can enjoy from a well-planned and deployed CSAT survey.
What Is a Customer Satisfaction Score?
A CSAT score is an industry-standard measurement of customer satisfaction (or, in some cases, dissatisfaction). It is the percentage of positive responses over negative responses from customers who voluntarily answer a customer satisfaction survey.
A typical CSAT survey consists of one or more questions in which customers will rate their answers according to a given scale. The scale could range from 1-3 or 1-10. Here’s a common example:
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with our product/service?
To calculate the customer satisfaction score, add all customer scores and divide the sum by the highest possible score. Multiply the answer by 100, and you get the percentage that is your CSAT score.
For example, suppose you ask the question above after buyers check out their carts and five people answered the survey.
Customer 1: 5
Customer 2: 7
Customer 3: 9
Customer 4: 7
Customer 5: 8
Total customer scores: 36
Highest possible score: 5 responses x 10 (highest on the scale) = 50
CSAT Score = (36/50) x 100 = 72 percent
A CSAT score of 72 percent suggests that about three in four customers are happy with the product or service you offer. Of course, this is an oversimplification: Analysts might want to delve further into the disparity between the customers’ scores (i.e., why did one customer give a 5 and another a 9?). This is just one example of how this standardized client satisfaction survey can give business owners insight into how happy customers are with their products or services.
Another variation of a customer satisfaction survey is to ask yes/no questions:
- Will you recommend our shop to your friends and family?
- Will you return to X branch?
- Did you receive the assistance you asked for?
- Did you enjoy our product/service?
To calculate the CSAT score, divide the number of positive answers by the total number of responses and multiply the answer by 100.
As an example, let’s suppose that six out of 20 people answered “yes” to a yes/no survey question.
CSAT Score = (6 positive answers/20 total answers) x 100 = 30 percent
Given a CSAT score of 30 percent, a business owner would know that their product or service needs further improvement because only one in three people had a positive experience. They must work to improve client satisfaction to show audiences and competitors a higher CSAT score.
What Is a Good or Bad CSAT Score?
Here’s a question we often hear: What is a “good” CSAT score, and what is a “poor” score?
According to Hubspot, CSAT scores between 75 and 80 percent are “good.” For Hootsuite, anything under 60 percent means there’s plenty of room for improvement, while over 80 percent is exceptional.
If you want to be very specific about where your CSAT score stands in your industry, however, you can check the most recent benchmarks from the American Customer Satisfaction Index. Your goal should be to score higher than your industry’s average. Based on the 2021 data, businesses that score 80 percent or higher are doing exceptionally well no matter which industry they belong to.
Is CSAT Still Relevant Today?
The purpose of CSAT scores is to give people a standardized numerical value of your company’s performance based on customer satisfaction. But now that consumers leave reviews on social media sites, forums, business listings and blog sites, and people can form opinions about a company based on those reviews alone, it would be fair to ask if CSATs are still relevant.
Our answer is yes. Getting a high CSAT score still matters for business because:
- It is a reliable measure of brand satisfaction and loyalty.
- It gives businesses a baseline to measure their performance against, whether they are competing within their industry or aiming to beat their own score.
- It is a reliable key performance indicator (KPI) for improving products, services or business processes.
- The survey itself can reveal information businesses can use for building client trust and loyalty.
One in three customers will abandon a brand or company they previously loved after one bad experience with it. According to PWC, positive experiences also influence buying decisions across industries by up to 78 percent. Conducting a CSAT survey is one of the best ways to find out how to improve customer experience and cultivate stronger, more satisfying business-to-consumer (B2C) relationships.
Analyzing CSAT Scores: What Insights Can You Get?
A customer experience survey can be just one question. You might be wondering, what insights can get you from a one-question survey that supposedly shows you how to improve client satisfaction?
Let us be clear: A CSAT survey can have many questions. Although, many questionnaires only have one to simplify their customer feedback management process. The less time and fewer clicks it takes to complete a client satisfaction survey, the higher the chances customers will answer it; and with CSAT, it’s vital to get a high response rate.
To get people to answer CSAT surveys and get meaningful data from them, you need to get the timing right. For example, adding a pop-up survey or inserting an interactive question on the checkout confirmation page can get you feedback regarding the buying experience on your eCommerce site. Customers can tell you if the process is quick and easy or too slow and complicated.
Another example is putting a survey question at the end of each blog post. People rarely leave comments on blogs and articles these days, so this is a good alternative for finding out which topics your readers find helpful.
When you ask the right questions at certain moments in the buyer’s journey, you can get feedback on specific parts of your service process. Collectively, the data can give you an overview of how customers perceive their overall experience with you.
Below are some examples of insights that you can get from customer satisfaction survey data:
- Trends in customer sentiment
CSAT surveys at each stage of the buyer’s journey or client life cycle can reveal which ones need improvement.
- Flaws in a product or service
Sending an SMS survey or email surveys several days after purchase can reveal standout flaws or common early defects in your product.
- Customer expectations
A yes/no question asking if customers are happy with your product or service can be an eye-opener regarding what your customers expect from you.
- Customer spending
Asking customers how much they are spending or willing to pay can inform your future decisions about increasing prices or offering premium products.
- Employee performance
The review monitoring of CSAT scores can also give you an idea of who, among your employees, is best at keeping clients happy.
The Benefits and Uses of Conducting CSAT Surveys
A customer experience survey offers other benefits besides getting an industry-recognized performance score. With CSAT surveys, you can:
- Improve your products and services.
- Improve customer satisfaction.
- Identify churn risks (if you want to keep important customers, you can work with an email marketing specialist to develop a remarketing campaign specifically for these customers).
- Identify subgroups in your target market and design marketing campaigns for each one.
- Discover if there is a product, service or stage in your buyer’s journey that needs improvement.
- Discover new products your customers might be interested in.
- Get feedback whenever you introduce new features for existing products and services.
- Provide a KPI for your sales and customer support employees (just be careful in interpreting the data and consider factors like the project’s difficulty level and whether a client is easy or hard to please).
- Refine your buyer personas based on the demographic data generated from your surveys (e.g., age range, sex, location).
- Have a standardized score that your competitors cannot refute (a high CSAT score, in particular, is ammunition for marketing).
Many of the benefits and uses listed above are contingent on how well you collect and synthesize CSAT survey data. They are just numbers until an expert interprets their connection to your performance.
This is why customer feedback management is important. It’s not enough to just hand out surveys. You should also monitor how many people answered, find ways to get as many responses as possible, collect the data, respond to negative reviews and address urgent concerns, if any.
SMS marketing agencies do something similar, but you can get more value for your money from specialists focusing on how to improve customer experience just as much as how to carry out the actual surveys. An online reputation management company like Rize can help you gather, interpret and summarize data into actionable insights you can use to improve client satisfaction. For more information on how Rize works, check out our case studies.
How To Conduct CSAT Surveys and Get High Response Rates
We’ve covered the importance of CSAT surveys and the benefits you can expect from them. But there is one more thing you need to know: the value of CSAT scores and insights increases with the number of responses you get. Simply put, data from 200 responses is more reliable than data from only 10.
Here are some best practices on how to get more responses to your CSAT surveys:
- Offer a survey after each major touchpoint in the buyer’s journey. Examples would be after online checkout, client onboarding and post-transaction customer support. Monthly email surveys or a scheduled SMS survey for customers who subscribed to your newsletters can also measure overall customer health and sentiment.
- Use interactive forms. According to a study by Content Marketing Institute, 87 percent of marketers believe that interactive content catches attention more than static content.
- Ask close-ended questions that require short answers.
- Ask open-ended questions and provide an answer box where customers can expound on their answers.
- Use an in-app or SMS survey if you use mobile apps.
- When putting together a lengthy survey, ask product-specific questions before broad questions. This prevents customers from giving a product-specific rating for a broad question (a customer can give a low rating for a minor product flaw even if they were happy with your overall service).
- Send lengthy surveys via email newsletter. People are more likely to read and answer long surveys via email.
- Don’t interrupt the checkout process with a survey. Customers might skip the survey and end up abandoning their carts.
Knowing when and how to present CSAT surveys will ensure the accuracy and integrity of your data. Use the tips above to increase your customer response rate.
Streamline Your CSAT Surveys To Maximize Its Benefits
Conducting a customer experience survey requires time and regular review monitoring. It is a manageable task, but you might want to spend time managing your core operations instead.
Here’s where Rize can be of use to you. We are an online reputation management company offering top-of-the-line online reputation management software that includes survey campaign management. Conducting your CSAT surveys will be easy with our software because you can put together a survey questionnaire, deploy it through email and SMS, collect and analyze data right on the Rize platform.
We also offer the services of an email marketing specialist who can assist you in review monitoring, calculating scores and extracting insights from your customers’ responses. This is on top of the powerful online reputation management software that you can use to monitor and collect client feedback across the web.
Streamlining these processes through Rize is cost-efficient. There’s no need to pay extra for other email surveys and SMS marketing agencies, for example, because the platform can also send surveys via drip marketing campaigns on email and SMS. You can also run more targeted feedback collection campaigns and generate customer information to unlock new methods for generating more revenue.
Optimize your customer satisfaction survey with Rize and improve your chances of getting a high CSAT score. We will help your business maintain a positive online brand reputation.
If you need more information about how the Rize team and our Survey Campaign Management software work, get in touch. We’re thrilled to show you what we can do for your business.
Leave a Reply