What is customer satisfaction score?
Customer satisfaction score, or CSAT, is the most widely used measure of how customers feel about the service they’ve received. It is usually gathered straight after an interaction with a single question such as “How satisfied were you with the service you received today?” and a rating scale.
Common scales include 1 to 5, 1 to 10, or a simple set of faces or thumbs. Surveys are sent by SMS, email or a short automated phone survey at the end of a call, or shown at the end of a webchat.
How CSAT is calculated
The most common method counts the share of positive responses:
CSAT = (number of satisfied responses / total responses) x 100
On a 1 to 5 scale, “satisfied” normally means a 4 or 5. So if 1,000 customers respond and 820 choose 4 or 5, CSAT is 82%.
Some organisations report the average rating instead (for example, 4.2 out of 5). Both are valid, but they aren’t interchangeable, so be clear which you use when comparing providers, teams or time periods.
Why CSAT matters in a contact centre
Operational measures like average handle time and service level describe efficiency. CSAT describes the result from the customer’s side. It’s useful because it can be measured:
- Per interaction, so it can be linked to the agent, channel, queue and contact reason.
- Quickly, while the experience is fresh.
- Consistently, making it easy to track trends week to week.
Low scores often point to fixable problems, such as long waits, repeat contacts, unclear answers or poor transfers.
What drives customer satisfaction
Across most contact centres, a few factors consistently shape CSAT:
- Resolution. First contact resolution is one of the strongest drivers. Customers who have to call back rate lower.
- Wait time. Long queues and high abandonment colour the whole experience before the conversation even starts.
- Effort. Repeating information, being transferred cold or navigating a complicated IVR all reduce satisfaction. Customer effort score measures this directly.
- Agent knowledge and manner. Accurate information, delivered warmly and confidently, matters as much as speed.
Limitations and good practice
CSAT is valuable, but it has well-known weaknesses:
- Low response rates. Often only a small share of customers respond, and those with strong feelings are overrepresented.
- It reflects the situation, not just the service. A customer whose power has been off for a day may score the call low even if the agent did everything right. Compare like with like by contact reason.
- It can be gamed. Agents shouldn’t be able to choose which customers are surveyed.
- It doesn’t explain itself. A score shows that something went wrong, not what.
Good practice is to keep the survey short, add an optional free-text question, survey consistently across channels, and read CSAT alongside net promoter score, quality assurance results and sentiment analysis of the conversations themselves. Together they tell you how customers felt and why.