What is Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)?
Customer Satisfaction Score is a survey-based metric measuring how satisfied a customer was with a specific interaction, product, or support experience. It's usually expressed as a percentage of respondents who chose a positive rating, most often collected through a simple post-interaction survey with a numeric or star scale.
TL;DR
Customer Satisfaction Score measures how happy a customer was with a specific interaction, expressed as the percentage of respondents who rated it positively.
Formula
Customer Satisfaction Score = (Number of Positive Responses / Total Number of Responses) x 100, where positive responses are typically the top one or two ratings on the survey scale used.
Why It Matters
Customer Satisfaction Score matters because it's the most widely used, fastest-to-collect signal of how a specific interaction landed with a customer, giving teams a near-real-time pulse on service quality rather than waiting for a broader relationship metric like churn to move. Because it's tied to a specific interaction rather than the overall relationship, CSAT is particularly useful for identifying exactly which touchpoints, like a specific support channel or onboarding step, are underperforming. It's a narrower signal than something like Net Promoter Score, which asks about overall likelihood to recommend, so CSAT works best alongside other retention signals rather than as a single source of truth about customer health. A consistently low CSAT on a specific interaction type is usually one of the clearest, most actionable signals a team gets.
Example
A support team surveys customers immediately after each ticket closes, asking how satisfied were you with this interaction on a 1-to-5 scale. Out of 200 responses in a month, 160 customers rated it a 4 or 5. CSAT for that period is 160 divided by 200, times 100, which equals 80%.
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