What Is A Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) & How To Measure It?

Whether we’re selling a product or a service, we always want to know whether our customers are happy with our brand and what we have to offer them – right?If you’re nodding along in agreement, you may be shocked to learn that many E-Commerce brands still aren’t tracking their Customer Satisfaction (or CSAT) scores in 2023. Back in 2018, a study by Lumoa found that only 44% of companies regularly measured CSAT compared to 65% of companies that measured Net Promoter Score (NPS) – that’s less than half!To truly stay competitive in a highly-saturated market, it’s crucial that companies stay on top of their customer satisfaction efforts and how they affect their overall CSAT scores (and, ultimately, future business growth).
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How To Calculate CSAT Scores Using A Simple Formula

Customer service is truly the backbone of any business, and offering quality support to maximize customer satisfaction is how you can build a solid foundation for your brand. Brands with high rates of customer satisfaction not only increase their revenue from referrals and repeat buyers but also improve their bottom line but saving money on acquisition and marketing costs. It may sound too good to be true, but even a 5% increase in retention (yep, just 5%) can increase a company’s revenue by 25-95%. Not too shabby, eh?To see where your brand falls on the customer satisfaction scale, determine when you want to send out your surveys. The timing will help you decide what kind of questions you want to ask your customers. Here are a few examples: If you want to hear your customers’ general satisfaction, you’ll want to ask, “How satisfied are you with {our company}?” and use either a 5-point or 10-point scale.

However, suppose you’re curious about how satisfied your customers are after interacting with a customer service agent. In that case, the question you may want to ask is, “How would you rate your recent conversation with our team?” Whether you’re using a 5-point or 10-point scale in your surveys, you’ll want to scope out the highest scores (either the 4s & 5s or 9s & 10s, respectively) and add up the total number of highly-satisfied customers. From there, you can use the following formula to calculate your CSAT score easily:(Number of satisfied customers / Number of surveyed customers) x 100 = % of satisfied customers
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When To Use CSAT Scores To Assess The Impact Of Customer Satisfaction On Your E-Commerce Business

Though we covered a couple of examples of when you can use CSAT surveys, such as after a customer service interaction or after a customer has made a certain number of purchases from you, there are plenty of other opportunities throughout your customer journey where you may want insight into how your customers are feeling.

1. After Key Customer Touchpoints

Your customer journey touchpoints should continuously be optimized to meet customers’ needs and expectations, but let’s face it – some customer touchpoints can have a more significant impact than others. For example, after a customer has made their very first purchase with your brand or signed up for a subscription for one of your products, you may want to hear their feedback on how they viewed the process.If there were any hiccups during their checkout process or with setting up the subscription, allowing your customers to share their level of satisfaction with you offers an opportunity to revisit areas of your online store or order fulfillment process that could be improved.

2. Before Subscription Renewals

The experience of signing up for a subscription doesn’t start and end with entering payment info and hitting “Subscribe” (if only it were that easy, eh?). If there are issues that you’re not aware of regarding subscription products such as order delays, learning about them before it’s time for a customer to decide whether or not they’ll renew will give your team space to fix the problems before potentially losing a customer. To make this process absolutely seamless, we recommend setting up an automation within your helpdesk software that sends out CSAT surveys to subscription customers before their renewal opportunity.

3. Following Interactions With Customer Service Or Self-Service Options

Though we mentioned that CSAT surveys should be sent after interactions with customer service to gauge your team’s effectiveness, we also advise implementing an automation that triggers a CSAT survey request after a customer interacts with a self-service option. Over 35% of consumers have said they find it very important to have a self-serve customer care option available to resolve their needs, such as a chatbot, knowledge base article, or even an FAQ page. However, if your knowledge base or chatbot isn’t providing the information they need or, even worse, not optimized to work well on mobile (gasp!), it’ll likely lead to frustration for your customers. A CSAT score that asks specifically about the self-service option a customer accessed helps you learn more about where improvements can be made to your resource library or chatbot response templates.

Partner With TalentPop To Keep Your CSAT Scores Strong and Promote Future Business Growth

Measuring customer satisfaction through CSAT surveys is essential to any successful business strategy. Once you understand how your customers feel after key moments and interactions with your brand, you’ll be better equipped to improve your internal processes to elevate the customer experience and satisfy more shoppers. At TalentPop, the customer service agents hired by our various E-Commerce clients like Wandering Bear Coffee Co. & Tumble Living not only help them set up automations that streamline their processes, but they also work hard to make sure that each interaction with customers ends with a positive resolution. If you’re ready to experience this kind of support for your brand, consider working with TalentPop.Start by scheduling a call with our team today, and we’ll fill you in on how we can help you maximize your customer service efforts to achieve higher Customer Satisfaction Scores.