CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score)

CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) is one of the simplest and most widely used metrics of customer happiness. It asks a single question — some variant of "How satisfied were you with…?" — about a specific product, service or interaction, answered on a short scale, most commonly 1 (very dissatisfied) to 5 (very satisfied).

How CSAT works

The score is the share of positive responses (usually 4s and 5s) among all responses received:

CSAT = (number of 4–5 ratings / total ratings) × 100%

If 160 of 200 respondents pick a 4 or 5, CSAT is 80%. The method's strength is its transactional focus: the question is asked right after the event it measures — a resolved helpdesk ticket, a completed delivery, a finished onboarding call — so the answer reflects a fresh, concrete experience rather than a diffuse feeling about the brand. Overall brand loyalty is the territory of NPS, which asks about willingness to recommend; CSAT and NPS complement rather than replace each other.

Surveys are delivered by email, in-app widgets, on-page prompts, or automatically at ticket closure. Brevity drives response rates: one rating question plus an optional free-text comment is the standard pattern, and the comments are where the diagnostic gold lives.

Practical applications

CSAT serves as an operational KPI for support, success and product teams. Hosting providers and SaaS companies typically rate every closed support ticket, then slice results by team, agent, channel, issue category and time of day — a dip isolated to one category points straight at the process that needs fixing. Trend lines matter more than absolute values, though as a rough convention scores above 75–80% are considered healthy.

Know the caveats: response bias skews toward customers with strong emotions in either direction, cultural norms shift how people use rating scales, and the number alone says nothing about causes. Treat CSAT as an early-warning signal, mine the comments for root causes, and pair it with complementary measures — NPS for relationship strength and Customer Effort Score for how hard customers had to work to get help.