Measuring Customer Satisfaction with CSAT, NPS, and CES

In the competitive arena of modern commerce, customer satisfaction has become the heartbeat of business vitality. Recognizing how customers perceive their interactions with your company is pivotal, forecasting success and signaling potential growth. Yet quantifying such an intangible aspect requires more than intuition—it necessitates a strategic, metric-driven approach. As we delve into the world of CSAT, NPS, and CES, we aim to navigate the intricate landscape of customer feedback and distill it into potent insights that can catapult your company forward.

The power shift toward consumers in the digital age makes understanding and measuring their satisfaction an imperative business function. To demystify this process, we will scrutinize the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), the Net Promoter Score (NPS), and the Customer Effort Score (CES), revealing how each can be effectively utilized to refine the customer experience. Join us as we unravel these pivotal metrics, allowing you to shape a customer-centric strategy that's not just reactive, but proactive and predictive.

Customer satisfaction is a measure of how satisfied your customers are with your business, product, or service. It’s a significant contributor to every company's success and can even be the number one growth driving factor for some industries.

While the term “customer satisfaction” and “customer experience” are often used interchangeably, they are actually quite different. Customer experience (CX) is the total impression your company leaves on a customer during their journey of interacting with a product or service.

In this sense, we can say that customer satisfaction is just one aspect of the customer experience journey.

But how important is customer satisfaction really? Let’s find out by exploring the latest industry statistics.

• According to Emplifi, 49% of consumers left a brand due to poor customer experience in 2021

• PwC reports that 65% of US customers think that having a good customer experience influenced them more than good advertising

• 77% of worldwide consumers consider customer experience as important as the quality of a product or service, according to Forbe’s Insights and Arm Treasure Data survey

• The chart below, sourced from Hubspot, illustrates that an expanding number of businesses are embracing customer satisfaction as a crucial priority.

While there are various metrics companies can use to measure customer satisfaction these days, the following three are most commonly used.

• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

• Net Promoter Score (NPS)

• Customer Effort Score (CES)

So now that you understand what customer satisfaction is, let’s dig deeper into each of these three key metrics.

With CSAT surveys, the question you ask your customers is: “How satisfied are you with interaction/feature/service?”

For more specific examples, take a look at the list below.

• How satisfied are you with the support agent’s performance?

• How satisfied are you with our new dashboard design?

• How satisfied are you with the delivery time?

• How satisfied are you with the analytics feature?

Then your customer replies using a scale from 1 (very unsatisfied) to 5 (very satisfied). Thanks to the scale’s short range, you can get creative and replace numbers with symbols. The two most commonly used symbols are stars and emoticons, ranging from sad to smiling.

Keep in mind that you aren’t limited to just one question. You can ask as many as you’d like. Just try not to overwhelm the customers by asking too many questions all at once.

Compared to NPS, the Customer Satisfaction Score is used for a more frequent and detailed analysis of your business's customer satisfaction.

CSAT surveys are best sent immediately after each customer interaction with support or sales. That way, you ensure you get feedback while their impression is still fresh and honest.

The simplest way to calculate the CSAT score is by adding up the percentages of customers who rated an interaction with a 4 or a 5.

You use NPS surveys to ask your customers this single question: “How likely are you to recommend this company/service/product to your friends/family/colleagues?”

Your customers then reply using a numbered scale, ranging from 0 (not at all) to 10 (very likely), for example.

Once you get the results, you split them into the following three groups accordingly.

• Promoters are the ones that leave a rating of 9 or 10

• Passives are the ones that leave a rating of 7 or 8

• Detractors are the ones that leave a rating of 6 or less

Compared to the other two CX metrics, the Net Promoter Score is the most general and long-term oriented metric for measuring customer loyalty.

We recommend sending NPS surveys to new customers as soon as they get a full impression of your service or product. After receiving the initial feedback, you should send out the survey periodically in order to measure customer satisfaction over time.

The NPS score is represented by a number ranging from -100 to 100. In order to calculate it, you would subtract the percentage of promoters from the percentage of detractors.

CES surveys help you discover how much effort your customers need to put in to interact with some aspect of your business or service.

Here are some examples of what kind of questions you might ask using a CES survey:

• How easy were you able to find the desired product in our store?

• How easy was it to return your items for a refund?

• How easy was our onboarding process for you?

• How easy was it to report a bug on our platform?

Just like CSAT, CES is used for a more frequent and detailed analysis of your business's customer satisfaction.

It’s best to send out CES surveys as soon as an interaction with a customer is complete. That way, you ensure you get the most accurate feedback.

To calculate the CES score, you would add up the percentages of customers who rated an interaction with a 4 or a 5.

And that’s all you need to know to start improving your customer satisfaction today.

First, we explained what customer satisfaction is and how it's different from customer experience. Then, we demonstrated the significance of its impact with some mind-blowing statistics from various sources. Finally, we looked closely at the three most widely used customer satisfaction metrics and showed you how to calculate each of them.

So let’s sum up all that we learned in this article with three key takeaways:

• To measure customer satisfaction, use the Customer Satisfaction Score or CSAT

• To measure customer loyalty, use the Net Promoter Score or NPS

• To measure customer effort and make things easy, use the Customer Effort Score of CES

Now that you have a clear picture of how to take advantage of these three systems, it’s time to take action. The sooner you implement these surveys, the sooner you can improve your services and accelerate business growth.