Customer satisfaction surveys (or CSAT surveys for short) are a way to measure customer satisfaction by directly asking them about their experience. Modern CSAT surveys usually take the form of one-click surveys to make the process as non-intrusive as possible for customers, while still being useful to organizations. Read on to learn all about CSAT surveys, including why satisfaction measurement is crucial and how to run surveys and interpret data.
An example of a customer feedback survey
The purpose of a CSAT survey is to provide you with KPIs – quantifiable measurements that let you gather business intelligence and make decisions based on data. So, an example of a modern CSAT survey looks like this:
Clicking on any rating button gets the surveyed customers to the second step – an optional comment field. Since they already invested some time in sharing their first thought, they are more likely to add a comment to provide context for their rating, support their claim or vent their frustration.
You might be tempted to use a full-blown questionnaire instead of a one-click survey. But this kind of survey doesn’t work well for CSAT. Customers value their time and are unlikely to spend 15 minutes answering repetitive questions. From your company’s point of view, it doesn’t provide you with relevant data, since the dataset is not representative. You can increase the number of responses by offering incentives, but that can distort the results.
Customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys, which we’re going to focus on here, are just one type of surveys. Other popular survey types include:
- net promoter score (NPS) surveys – these measure how likely a customer is to recommend a product, service or company.
- customer effort score (CES) surveys – these gauge how easy or difficult was for a customer to complete a specific task (e.g. update a product).
- product market fit surveys – these provide you with data about your product’s/service’s ability to satisfy a market need.
Want more inspiration? See more examples of modern surveys
Why should CSAT surveys matter to your business?
It goes without saying that feedback is essential for contemporary businesses to improve and compete in the market. Every opinion counts, either confirming that the right decisions are being made (positive feedback) or highlighting areas that need improvement (negative feedback). Thanks to the simplicity of one-click surveys, measuring customer satisfaction can be a win-win situation. For your customers, it takes a matter of seconds to express their opinions, while your business gets useful data.
CSAT survey results let you get an insight into how your experiences (e.g. services, products) perform and thus make well-thought decisions. With the surveys coupled with the right CSAT analytics tool, you can easily observe trends, see how they change over time, or even compare how your departments or employees perform.
With data coming from customer satisfaction surveys, you can also be proactive. A good rule of thumb is to share a CSAT survey with a customer no later than 24 hours after their interaction with your products or services. This ensures you get precise, up-to-date feedback that’s related to a specific product/service and a customer at a specific point in time. This, in turn, lets you react quickly, e.g. contact most satisfied customers to ask for testimonials or reach out to the least satisfied ones to resolve issues before they escalate.
Lastly, you can use customer feedback surveys at any stage of a product’s or service’s lifecycle to improve each aspect of the experience. Just have a look at the activities that give you an opportunity to share CSAT surveys with your customers:
- Selling or demoing your product or service
- Customer onboarding
- Visiting your store or service center
- Closing a support case
Using CSAT surveys on those occasions, you can not only collect lots of customer voices, but also learn which specific aspects need your attention (and improvement).
How to run automated customer satisfaction surveys?
To learn about the level of your customers’ satisfaction, you need to first run a survey or a series of surveys linked to specific user experiences. It’s a good idea to share a CSAT survey with a customer through the same medium you’ve just interacted with them.
For example, if you’ve got an online store and someone buys a product/service, you can display a CSAT popup on the store website, right after the purchase process ends.
If your customer support specialists primarily email customers, it would be best to include a CSAT in the last email that concludes a support case, for example by adding a CSAT survey to their email signature.
In principle, to measure satisfaction, you’ll need survey software that takes care of designing and incorporating CSAT surveys into your website, app or emails, as well as analyzing the survey results for you (which we’ll talk about in a moment).
There are plenty of satisfaction survey tools on the market that you can look up. If your customer interactions are email-based, we recommend our CodeTwo Email Signatures 365 that comes with one-click surveys and also lets you manage email signatures, automatic replies and email disclaimers.
How to design a perfect CSAT survey in a few steps?
Once you’ve chosen and become familiar with the right survey tool, you can start designing your CSAT survey.
- First, decide on the right question that matches your case – here you can find some professional examples.
- Decide on the rating scale to click for your customers – in general, the more rating icons (smileys) you use, the more detailed your results will be, but don’t overdo it. In practice, 5 rating icons is the most common setup that should do the work both for you and your customers.
- Choose the design of the rating icons. It’s 100% up to you – as they say, there’s no accounting for taste. Tip: You might consider matching rating icons’ appearance to your company branding.
- Decide whether you want to include an open-ended question. If your CSAT tool offers this feature, it’s usually a good idea to have a text box for your customer to optionally leave a comment. With that, you can get even more details about your product, service or company.
How to calculate the satisfaction score?
Once you’ve run your survey(s), responses from your customers should start coming in. With that data at hand, you can proceed to calculate the satisfaction score, which reflects your customers’ level of satisfaction.
As mentioned earlier, satisfaction survey software comes with data analytics features that let you store, analyze and dissect your data the way you want. For example, CodeTwo Email Signatures 365 includes CodeTwo Insights app for these purposes.
First and foremost, your satisfaction survey tool should allow you to calculate satisfaction score (in percents) using this basic formula:
Satisfaction scores are usually calculated over a selected time period, so the tool should not only show the overall score, but also let you select the right data range that interests you.
These are the basics. Now, let’s have a look at specific CSAT survey results and what they mean to you.
How to interpret customer satisfaction survey results
Here we assume you’re using the most popular and balanced 5-point scale survey, where 1 stands for an ‘Awful’ and 5 for an ‘Excellent’ experience:
What are good CSAT survey results?
Essentially, if your customers click the 4th (Good) or 5th (Excellent) rating icon on the 5-point scale, you can assume they are satisfied. Only responses with those ratings should be counted as “Number of satisfied customers” in the formula we’ve shown above.
While getting close to 100% satisfaction score is highly improbable, you should strive to keep CSAT as high as possible. However, usually CSAT on its own isn’t very useful as a KPI. It’s the trends and changes in CSAT that are the most useful – they let you compare scores with particular events and changes in your company and encourage further changes in the right direction.
What are bad customer feedback survey results?
The 3rd rating (Neutral) indicates that there’s a room for improvement. For an analytical mind, neutral feedback is more valuable than the positive one. That’s where you get business intelligence, feature requests and ideas that will help you win over customers that might be on the verge of looking for alternatives.
The 1st (Awful) and 2nd (Bad) ratings are expressly negative and indicate there’s some sort of serious issue with your product, service or company experience, or your services aren’t a perfect fit for a specific customer. It’s crucial to react to the negative feedback as quickly as possible, before the issue escalates.
Dissect data
Calculating the overall satisfaction score is one thing. Good satisfaction survey software should also let you do more like see satisfaction score history or segment results by departments, individual people (e.g. your salesmen) and different criteria like region/branch.
Here, you can see a sample presentation on how your satisfaction score changed over the days:
This screenshot shows how individual people from your Sales Team are performing:
Being able to see how the satisfaction score or satisfaction ratings change over time or among people, departments, etc. can give you a better and more detailed insight to determine what exactly needs to be improved, what has made your customers less satisfied (e.g. the ratings dropped since the last update of your app), and so on.
Customer satisfaction surveys – key takeaways
So, what are the most important things you should remember when it comes to CSAT surveys?
- One-click surveys are the way to go to measure customer satisfaction nowadays.
- Measuring customer satisfaction is essential for you to improve and compete.
- To design and push surveys to customers and analyze the gathered data, you need satisfaction survey software.
- A 5-point scale is the most popular and balanced format, providing enough insights while being easy for customers.
- You should aim for a satisfaction score above 90%.
- Apart from being able to calculate the satisfaction score, a good satisfaction survey tool should offer more advanced analytics like historical data and result segmentation.
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