There are many ways to measure how customers feel about your product or service, and CSAT is one of the most powerful metrics in your customer experience toolkit.

In this guide, we'll define what CSAT is, why it's critical for your business success, and provide actionable tips on how to measure it effectively. We'll also explore the relationship between CSAT scores and customer expectations.

What is the definition of CSAT?

CSAT stands for customer satisfaction.

It's one of the core customer service metrics businesses use to measure how customers feel about the product and service.

Customer service teams use CSAT surveys to collect both quantitative and qualitative data from customers about how satisfied they are. These survey responses provide rich customer feedback that help support teams identify both positive experiences and areas for improvement.

This data can then be used to make improvements to both customer service workflows and the product or service a business provides, ultimately leading to improved customer retention and business growth.

These are the key factors that impact how customers respond to CSAT surveys:

The quality of the product or service. This is heavily influenced by things like how personalized your customer experience is or the quality of your communication at key touchpoints.
The responsiveness of the customer support team, usually first response time (FRT). Most businesses experience a heavy correlation between FRT and CSAT.
The overall customer experience, going beyond the interactions with your support team. For example, if a customer is unhappy with something fundamental in your product, your CS team will have a hard time still getting a positive CSAT response.
The ease of use and customer effort required to use the product, contact support, or solve the issue.
The perceived value of your product, especially in relation to its cost.

Why is measuring customer satisfaction important?

CSAT helps you understand how your customers are feeling about your business at various touchpoints throughout the customer lifecycle. These insights provide actionable data so you can understand what's working well and where you can improve.

A lot of businesses fall into the trap of assuming they know how customers feel. This assumption can be costly, as you miss out on improving systems, processes, service experiences, and products. If your customers aren't happy, you want to know, and this is where CSAT shines.

Unhappy customers are more likely to leave and use a competitor. In fact, 73% of customers switch after a single bad experience. On the other hand, satisfied customers become loyal customers who are more likely to stick around and become champions for your business.

CSAT scores ultimately help you identify opportunities for improving customer retention and growth.

Customer satisfaction scores also promote a culture of continuous improvement, and this can result in happier employees. Happier employees are then more engaged and motivated to provide better service. This creates a virtuous cycle that benefits your entire organization, as employee satisfaction directly correlates with customer satisfaction.

So happier employees make happy customers, and happy customers make happy employees.

This cycle is extremely powerful in building a strong business that customers want to work with, creating both exceptional customer experiences and significant business growth.

While similar to other customer experience metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Effort Score (CES), CSAT gives businesses a high-level view of customer sentiment that's specifically tied to individual interactions.

The biggest challenge some companies face with CSAT is they treat it as a metric that’s exclusive to their customer service team.

While support agents are often on the front lines of customer interactions, a customer's satisfaction is influenced by every touchpoint in their journey. Product quality, website usability, marketing messaging, sales promises, billing clarity, and even post-purchase communications all impact how a customer feels about your brand.

What is a CSAT score?

A CSAT score is typically collected through a survey or feedback form after or during a customer support interaction. Modern CSAT surveys usually employ a 5-point rating system with the option to leave comments or additional qualitative feedback. This simple question approach increases response rates while providing valuable insights.

Most CSAT scores are calculated using a 5-point scale (also called a 1-5 scale), though a 10-point scale is also common.

The scale is typically tied to descriptive labels such as "very satisfied," "satisfied," "neutral," "dissatisfied," and "very dissatisfied." These satisfaction levels provide a standardized measurement system. Some businesses also measure CSAT as a simple binary metric, where customers can state that they’re satisfied or dissatisfied.

It’s usually a good practice to let customers leave comments for additional feedback. This combination of quantitative and qualitative data can provide a much richer impression of how customers are feeling and helps identify the specific drivers behind customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction.

How CSAT is calculated

Customers receive a CSAT survey at the end of an interaction with the support team.

A CSAT survey should be short and sweet, giving the customer the option to select a single rating for how they feel.

Once CSAT scores are collected, they are aggregated and analyzed to determine the overall customer satisfaction score for your customers as a collective. Analytics tools like Supportman can help track these scores over time, providing deeper insights into customer satisfaction trends.

CSAT is usually calculated as a percentage.

CSAT (%) = (Number of satisfied responses) ÷ (Total number of ratings) x 100

In this calculation formula, "satisfied responses" typically refers to ratings of 4 or 5 on a 5-point scale. Some organizations might define satisfaction differently based on their business context and goals.

A high CSAT score indicates customer expectations are being met and customers are, for the most part, happy with your product or service. This suggests your business is delivering positive experiences that align with or exceed what your customers anticipate.

A low CSAT score is an opportunity to make improvements to the customer experience.

An amazing CSAT score is usually above 90%. Note that CSAT is heavily influenced by the industry you’re in and your customer expectations, so it’s usually a good idea to compare against your own historical performance and to look into what your competitors are reaching.

The relationship between CSAT scores and customer expectations

Most people think that customer service is all about meeting customer expectations.

The real challenge is that meeting expectations isn’t really enough to stand out from competitors today. What you really need is to consistently exceed expectations, creating moments of delight and surprise for customers.

And that’s not easy. Customer expectations are higher than ever in 2025, with 62% of consumers now expecting personalized experiences as standard.

Meeting vs. exceeding customer expectations

If businesses across all industries share one goal, it is to meet customer expectations.

Not doing so hurts customer satisfaction which can impact retention and your bottom line. In fact, connecting emotionally with your customers can raise their customer lifetime value by up to 306%.

Focusing on meeting and exceeding customer expectations gives you a competitive advantage compared to competitors who are less customer-focused. It requires a well-trained customer service team that is equipped with the essential customer service skills to handle customer questions and problems. It also requires a product team that is constantly focused on delivering quality work.

This approach improves your relationship with customers and builds a positive reputation around your company which can spread like wildfire and bring you even more potential customers.

What meeting customer expectations looks like

Let's say you ordered a new French press and it arrives broken.

You call the company and ask for a refund or a replacement. They agree and order you a new French press.

In this example, the company addresses the problem quickly, and the support team handles the issue with care and empathy. The customer's expectations have been met. The immediate problem is resolved–which is great! Or is it?

This is often the bare minimum that customers expect.

Example of exceeding customer expectations

Take the same scenario.

This time, your replacement French press includes a free bag of coffee along with a personalized note apologizing for the inconvenience.

Here, the company exceeds expectations by providing a replacement quickly and going the extra mile to send a free bag of coffee with a personal touch. The free coffee and note aren't necessary but they're a great addition that transforms a negative situation into a memorable positive one.

Exceptional experiences create delightful moments and lasting memories.

Understanding changing customer needs

Customer needs and expectations change over time. Technological advancements and changes in markets and industries can impact what customers expect from businesses. Zendesk’s CX Trends Report for 2025 found that 81% of consumers now believe AI has become a standard part of modern customer service.

CSAT surveys are a brilliant way to highlight changing customer needs. If you take those learnings and apply them, they can help you implement the necessary improvements in your product for building customer loyalty.

For example, without a CSAT survey, you might not realize that your customers now need and expect initial response times to be within 30 minutes whereas they were previously satisfied with a 1 hour response time.

That might sound like a small change, but a couple of these bundled together can compound into something that really impacts your business.

5 steps to implementing a great CSAT survey

Measuring CSAT isn't rocket science, it's actually quite easy to create a survey and get it implemented within your support workflow.

That said, putting a little more thought into how you do it can improve your response rates and the quality of the feedback you receive.

1. Choose the right survey method

First, you need to choose the tool you'll use to create the survey. There are many customer experience tools available that help you measure customer satisfaction easily and integrate with your existing systems.

Tools like Nicereply, AskNicely, SurveyMonkey, and GetFeedback have been popular with support teams for many years. You can also create your own survey using Google Forms or another survey tool.

It’s a good idea to think about where you’d want to integrate that survey too. For example, Supportman can push CSAT data directly to Slack for real-time notifications. That’s a pretty fun way to add a ton of visibility to your CSAT surveys.

Once you've decided which tool you will use, you'll need to determine the rating scale for collecting feedback. If you want more granular data, go with a broader (10-point) rating scale. If you want a simple survey with less granular data to analyze, a 3- or 5-point rating scale might be adequate. The simpler the scale, the higher the response rates.

Most CSAT surveys give the responder an option to leave additional comments through open-ended questions, and this qualitative feedback can bring in rich insights for not just your support team, but your company as a whole.

These comments often reveal the "why" behind the ratings.

For a long time, analyzing those open comments used to take serious time but now that AI tools are widely accessible, it’s an extremely fast and simple way to get much deeper insights.

2. Design the survey

Create a brief survey that includes a clear CSAT question. Ideally, it should work equally as well on mobile as it does on larger screens–that feels obvious to say now but you’d be surprised how many tools still miss out on this very basic part.

While designing the survey, it’s good to avoid these two types of survey bias that can skew your results:

Selection bias: when results are skewed based on who received the survey. For example, only surveying customers who completed purchases rather than including those who abandoned their carts.
Response bias: when results are skewed due to how the actual survey is designed that encourage a certain type of answer. Leading questions or a confusing rating scale can contribute to this type of bias.

Survey bias can lead to false understandings which can result in poor business decisions. That mostly defeats the point of collecting CSAT.

If you want to get real, honest feedback and an accurate picture of customer sentiment, make sure you adapt the survey questions or your distribution method accordingly.

3. Figure out the target audience and distribution strategy

There are a few pieces to this:

Decide on the customer segments to target (e.g., all customers, customers who contacted support in the last month, or something else). Some businesses choose to avoid sending a CSAT survey in some cases because it doesn’t make sense in that flow.
It’s a great idea to segment by different customer types so you can identify varying satisfaction levels across your customer base.
Determine the timing and channels for distributing the survey (e.g., immediately after a support interaction, via email survey, embedded in the support chat interface, or through app surveys).

The entire value of running a CSAT survey comes from acting on the feedback you receive.

You can do this in a few ways:

Share your findings with relevant teams (e.g. product or sales) to give them a better picture of how customers feel.
Use a knowledge base tool like Tettra to document those insights and actions taken, which is especially valuable for tracking CSAT development over time.
Regularly review and report on CSAT as a metric, so it’s often top of mind.
Make sure you prioritize actions based on the feedback, so you can implement truly impactful improvements.

5. Close the loop with customers

This is one of the best ways of using CSAT.

Follow up with customers who provide feedback to let them know how their input has been used to make improvements. This can be a massive step in regaining trust after a negative interaction.

It also reinforces the value of their feedback and can enhance customer loyalty by showing that you take their input seriously.

Common challenges with CSAT surveys and how to overcome them

All that said, there are a few challenges that almost everyone runs into when they’re working with CSAT.

Customer satisfaction surveys are meant to measure customer happiness with your support team. A support rep might knock it out of the park—they respond quickly and with empathy, and they go above and beyond to solve the customer's problems.

Still, the CSAT response from that customer might be negative because of dissatisfaction with the product itself, not the support interaction. This highlights the importance of designing surveys that clearly distinguish between satisfaction with support versus satisfaction with products.

It's important to consider this when tying CSAT scores to customer support KPIs and using them as a metric for evaluating your customer service team's performance.

The support team doesn't have full control of the CSAT score—it's a team-wide effort involving product quality, pricing, marketing expectations, and many other factors. Yet, many businesses use CSAT scores as a key performance indicator of how well the support team is doing their job. A balanced approach that considers multiple customer service metrics provides a more complete picture.

Measuring the complete customer experience with satisfaction metrics

While CSAT is one specific type of customer satisfaction survey, it's not alone in the customer experience measurement toolkit.

Surveys like NPS (Net Promoter Score) and CES (Customer Effort Score) are also common ways of measuring your customers' perception of your experience. Each offers unique insights: CSAT captures immediate reaction to specific interactions, NPS measures broader loyalty, and CES evaluates ease of doing business with you.

Whatever type of survey you choose, make sure it is well thought-out, and make sure you're taking action on the data and insights you receive.

The most sophisticated KPI and survey program is worthless if you don't implement changes based on the feedback.

Using Supportman to continuously improve your CSAT scores

Customer satisfaction isn’t just a metric — it’s an early warning indicator to help prevent churn and keep customers for the long haul.

Retaining customers requires a great product and consistently delivering exceptional experiences that drive high satisfaction scores. It also requires listening to customers and creating feedback loops so that you can continually improve your customer service. If

CSAT surveys are one way to gather that feedback and improve, but we all know that only a subset of customers take the time to complete surveys. If you’d like more data so you can improve your customer support team, you should check out Supportman. When customers don't leave reviews or complete surveys, Supportman uses AI to estimate CSAT scores based on conversation sentiment.

That means more insights for you, without any extra work.

Add Supportman to Slack for free today to find out how we can help you level up your support experience.

Articles by Jake Bartlett

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