14 Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) KPIs: Key Metrics and How to Measure

Measuring CSAT allows you to comprehensively record the customer experience (CX). Using different CSAT key performance indicators (KPIs), you can fully understand how your customers respond to your brand. These metrics help you to measure customer loyalty, identify at-risk customers, reduce churn and attract new customers. 

Collecting feedback allows you to monitor your CX metrics with concrete data. Responding to this feedback helps you to improve your customer touchpoints and create a better CX.

As you streamline the customer journey at every touchpoint, your customers will report higher satisfaction. From there, you’ll experience higher profits, decreased churn and happier customers, so what’s not to love?

Keep reading to learn about the 14 CSAT KPIs that you need to track for business success.

CSAT KPIs are metrics that measure how happy customers are with a company’s products, services or interactions.

Measuring CSAT KPIs and acting on that data is a surefire way to improve the CX. In turn, it boosts CSAT and enhances everything from retention rates to overall revenue.

In fact, 91% of customers who have a positive experience with your brand will recommend your company.  According to a study by Temkin Group, around 77% of customers would recommend a brand to a friend after having a single positive experience.

CSAT is a key indicator of a business’s success in terms of meeting the needs and desires of its target audience. To achieve high levels of CSAT, an in-depth understanding of customer preferences, pain points and expectations is necessary. 

The bottom line is to increase CSAT and build a sustainable, profitable business.

Measuring CSAT is the key to success. Clear, quantifiable metrics will offer you the insight you need to monitor and develop a strategy to improve CSAT, leading to many other benefits. Take a look at the top benefits of measuring (and acting) on CSAT KPIs.

Measuring CSAT can help you uncover exactly why your customers are satisfied or dissatisfied. Understanding the CX can help to identify areas of high effort within the customer journey, allowing for targeted improvements.

Perhaps they love your customer service team but find your products mediocre. Maybe they find your services helpful but just loathe your billing process. Or maybe they love your CX overall but have issues with just one specific product, and this can be easily resolved to keep them delighted.

Whatever the problems are, you can’t resolve them until you know about them. You can capitalise on your strengths when you know exactly what they are. 

It’s expensive to acquire new customers and much more costly than retaining your existing ones. It costs between five and 25 times as much to gain a new customer as to keep one you already have.

The more satisfied your customers are, the less likely it is that they will turn to one of your competitors, and your retention rates will increase as a result of improved CSAT. 

What do Apple and Costco have in common? A base of loyal customers that consistently choose their products and services.

It’s more likely that customers who are satisfied with your service or products will have high levels of brand loyalty. Just think of the legions of Apple loyalists out there who purchase everything that the brand makes.

If you create an experience that satisfies customers, you can build a company that they think of and return to in a time of need.

Customers share their experiences with brands when they’re exceptional, either positively or negatively. And with the power of social media, their complaints and praise can be shared widely and amplified. A single negative customer interaction, often stemming from poor customer service, can have far-reaching consequences.

Maintaining a positive brand reputation is easier when you provide an exceptional CX. Customers will tell their friends and colleagues about how much they appreciate your service, giving your business free and effective advertising. 

Revenue is an undeniable metric that all businesses track. The good news is that measuring, tracking and improving CSAT can increase revenue. A ‘totally satisfied customer’ contributes 2.6 times more revenue than a ‘somewhat satisfied customer’.

Your business will see increased revenues by improving CSAT and, by proxy, boosting the customer lifetime value (CLV) and reducing churn rates. And when you have a higher CLV, you can spend more money to acquire customers, bringing in new business and further boosting profits. 

Customers who are satisfied not only make a purchase but also develop a lasting relationship with a brand, resulting in continued loyalty over the long term.

These customers tend to return for repeat business, recommend the brand to others and actively engage with the company’s offerings. By consistently meeting or exceeding their expectations, businesses can cultivate a loyal customer base that contributes to sustainable growth and positive word-of-mouth marketing.

Many businesses assume that they know how changes will affect CSAT or that if business is good, then everything must be fine. However, those assumptions are often wrong.

Measuring satisfaction levels by asking your customers directly helps you to make data-informed decisions about where to go. The importance of CSAT is too great to leave those assumptions unmeasured and untested. 

CX teams use CSAT surveys to measure touchpoint satisfaction. Consistently low ratings can tip off CX managers to customer journey or product issues.

It’s common for many businesses to focus first on their own priorities. But to really satisfy your customers’ needs, you should prioritise a customer-centric approach.

That means product testing. Testing helps you understand customer sentiment about upcoming changes and product launches and how they’ll affect your business.

Beginning by thinking about customers instead of the bottom line will result in an overall better CX. That’s what will leave them satisfied and highly loyal to you. 

Providing great customer service gives your business an advantage over others in your industry.

In fact, 89% of companies with CXs that are significantly above average perform better financially than their competitors.

Businesses use different types of CSAT metrics to understand their audience, including the following:

By utilising these CSAT metrics, businesses can gain a comprehensive understanding of their customers’ experiences and identify specific areas for improvement.

CSAT isn’t a single score: it’s a blend of KPIs that we’ll explain here.

The CSAT score allows businesses to directly measure CSAT with their company, products or services. It aims to monitor overall satisfaction while also identifying areas where an organisation could improve its offerings.

You can compare your CSAT to industry benchmarks to determine how your company is doing compared with its competitors. This metric can help you to monitor and improve customer retention and build better customer relationships.

A CSAT survey asks users “How would you rate your overall satisfaction with [Company/Product/Service]?”. Respondents can choose from a scale of 1 (very unsatisfied) to 5 (very satisfied).

You can measure CSAT by using the following formula: 

The NPS is a metric that is used to monitor levels of customer loyalty. Brands worldwide consider measuring NPS to be the leading method of tracking customer loyalty.

Measuring brand loyalty with NPS allows your brand to gauge how customers respond to your business. As you implement strategies to improve the CX, you can track how satisfaction increases by routinely taking this loyalty metric.

Using an NPS survey to measure loyalty is useful as this type of survey is simple and effective. Businesses only need to ask a close variant of “How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague.”. Answers can range on a scale from 1 to 10. 

Respondents are organised into three groups:

You can use an NPS calculator or the following formula to find your NPS.

Benchmark your score against your competitors or your industry average to see how your customers feel about your brand.

The CES measures the relative effort it takes for a customer to complete a certain interaction with your company. It aims to record effort at important customer touchpoints to streamline the CX.

If customers feel that interacting with your business, whether talking to support or buying something, is too difficult, they simply won’t do it. Reducing the effort that customers have to put in will lead to a smooth, frictionless experience.

You can trigger a CES survey when a customer interacts with a core touchpoint. A CES survey will ask respondents to choose a response from 1 (strongly agree) to 5 (strongly disagree) to express how they much they agree or disagree with the statement “[Company] made it easy to [touchpoint].”

Companies can use the following formula to get a fixed CES:

By acting on customer feedback, businesses can improve the CX at each touchpoint, reduce effort and boost overall satisfaction. Customers prefer brands that make their lives easier and reduce their effort when it comes to interactions.

Your company’s customer retention rate is a measure of how effective your business is at preventing customers from churning.

If your customers are happy enough to continue buying, it’s likely that they will feel satisfied with your products and service. On the other hand, lower rates could signify that your customers feel disappointed with your business.

By measuring your retention rates, you can determine whether your CX management strategies are having a positive effect. Improving customer loyalty and retention can help to improve profits and boost CLV.

You can measure the customer retention rate by using the following formula:

The FCR measures how well customer support resolves issues the first time a customer makes contact. Customers want you to resolve their problems fast and without passing them around between several other departments or representatives. 

Here’s how to measure FCR:

The CLV measures the amount of revenue a customer produces across their entire lifetime with your company. Every purchase that a customer makes, from their first to their last, contributes to their CLV. 

A customer with a high average CLV could suggest that the business has customers who routinely return to purchase again. Low CLVs may signify that customers purchase once but never again. In the latter case, your products and services may not be meeting customer expectations.

Monitoring and improving your CLV will help to increase your revenue while decreasing customer churn. Here’s how to calculate your CLV:

You can calculate the CLV either for specific segments, individual customers or your entire business. 

The FRT measures the number of minutes, hours or days that it takes for a service agent to respond to a customer’s first request or ticket submission. It can be calculated in business hours or general hours, depending on the company’s priorities and goals.

To measure FRT, use the following equation: 

The first response to a customer is key to establishing trust and a positive rapport. Although each company has its own particular goals, here are a few benchmarks to consider:

Average time to resolution is how long it takes, on average, for your team to resolve a customer’s issue and close a ticket. It helps you understand how efficiently you’re resolving customers’ issues.

Here’s how to measure average resolution time:

Average time to resolution is usually measured in terms of hours, and it often counts business hours rather than real-time hours. If you’re wondering what your goal should be, consider that the industry average is 8.85 business hours, according to MetricNet. Even so, numbers range widely. 

The repeat purchase rate measures the percentage of customers who make several purchases from a business. Since repeat customers are often responsible for a large portion of annual revenue in many industries, this metric can be very important.

Calculating repeat purchase rates is simple. Follow this equation:

The customer health score is a rating that measures a customer’s satisfaction with your brand and services or product. It is a good indicator of a customer’s likelihood of renewing or expanding services or products. 

Customer health is an assessment of engagement and satisfaction. From this assessment, you assign a ranking, such as A, B, C or D, or points, such as 1–100, that reflect internal standards. 

This metric is a good way to quickly assess account health. Customer support teams know that they should intervene in the case of a D-rated client who is ready to cancel their subscription rather than chasing up unresponsive yet satisfied customers who are intent on renewing.

Social media is made for engagement, sharing, talking and commenting. It makes people’s opinions known to the rest of the world.

Around 2.82 billion people use social media, and of those 2.82 billion people, some may be your customers. So what are your customers saying about your business?

You can leverage this function to gather social media sentiment about your brand, monitoring tagged posts, post responses and direct messages. So, in your efforts to collect feedback from your customers, social media is a great place to be.

Customer complaints are critical feedback based on an interaction, product or service experience or brand perception. 

It’s particularly important to monitor critical feedback because most customers who have poor experiences don’t complain about the experience; they just switch when it gets too bad.

Complaints, regardless of how many or few, are a warning sign that something is wrong. If one person is having a negative experience, you should assume that there are other customers who are having the same experience. Without actively monitoring for poor CX, most companies don’t even know they exist, so they can’t improve.

It’s no longer enough to wait for your customers to complain about something before you fix it. Exceptional CSAT has to be proactive, and that starts by regularly asking and listening to what your customers have to say. Monitoring your feedback helps you to identify sources of dissatisfaction before they become worse. 

Customer reviews are key to improving CSAT. They give customers insight into how people like them have enjoyed (or not enjoyed) your products so they can judge whether they will feel the same way.

Customer reviews have become a powerful aspect of determining the success or failure of brand offerings, with around 88% of customers influenced by online reviews when making a purchase decision.

Customers trust reviews from other buyers because they know there’s no incentive for those reviewers to give your business a falsely positive review. They must have truly enjoyed the product if they’re taking the time to leave positive feedback. 

They also provide a wealth of information on how customers feel about your products and services. You can use this data to determine what’s working well and what requires improvement in terms of your product offerings and turn that data into actions that improve the CX.  

Great customer service looks a little different for every organisation. After all, customers don’t expect luxury hotel service when staying in a budget hotel. That’s why there’s no single definition of great customer service. 

However, common points across companies and industries add up to great customer service. They are:

Use a customer service feedback survey to monitor the overall performance of customer service representatives.

What specific outcomes do you aim to achieve with your business? Identifying your company’s short-term and long-term goals is essential, as these objectives will serve as a roadmap for your CSAT initiatives.

For example, are you looking to improve customer retention, increase positive feedback or enhance overall service quality? If so, having clear, measurable objectives will enable you to tailor your strategies and assess the effectiveness of your efforts in terms of meeting customer needs and expectations.

Getting actionable results will depend on several factors. For example, who are you sending the survey to?

If you’re measuring customer service satisfaction, you should survey customers immediately after their customer support interaction. It sounds simple, doesn’t it? But who do you send the CES survey to? And the NPS survey?

You should carefully consider your market research objectives. Align your audience with these objectives. 

Your insights and subsequent initiatives are a direct reflection of your survey questions. You should ask the right questions to develop CSAT initiatives that improve the customer journey and build brand loyalty. If you ask questions that don’t align with your goals, you should beware of the consequences.

To ask the right questions, you can use CSAT survey templates. Templates are a quick and easy way to launch market research. SurveyMonkey templates are written by experts to ensure that you receive actionable insights.

Related reading: 50 customer satisfaction survey questions to strengthen CSAT

You’re measuring CSAT KPIs. Now what?

Analyse your results and prioritise process improvements.

Whether you need to improve your processes, implement new technology or simply respond to customers’ emails faster, CSAT feedback can help to drive lasting action.

You should also set up initiatives to keep a pulse on CSAT KPIs.

Tap into Sentiment Analysis to track the most common keywords and phrases that your customers are using and then analyse the sentiment automatically. This makes it easy to identify trends, flag issues and keep up with open-ended feedback.

Configure notifications to alert your team when you receive a low CSAT score so you can close the loop faster.

Plenty of CSAT KPIs measure different aspects of the customer journey. There are also a multitude of uniting best practices to bear in mind, as we will see below.

Which CSAT KPIs should you track? Retention rate? Average resolution time? Customer service satisfaction?

How about multiple CSAT KPIs?

No single metric is ‘better’. The first response time and the CLV both measure CSAT. However, they measure different touchpoints in the customer journey that can have an impact on the CX.

So you should track multiple metrics. Now what? Well, you should review your company objectives and align your metrics to them.

The best currency you have with customers is to prove that their voice matters. We all receive lots of surveys, and it’s quite common not to fill them out because we don’t think the company cares about our opinion.

There are a few ways to show that this is not the case, but the best solution is to make changes based on your feedback. Once customers realise that their voices are being heard, it’s more likely that they will share their thoughts with you.

CSAT levels vary widely from one industry to the next. Most people probably won’t be surprised to learn that internet service providers have low average rates and that people are generally highly satisfied with soft drinks companies (because they’re usually delicious!).

However, you shouldn’t use external or industry benchmarks as a reason to excuse your scores if they’re low. You’re competing mostly against yourself to satisfy and delight your customers as much as you possibly can. Satisfied customers are less price sensitive than their less loyal counterparts.

Yet these benchmarks can provide context for your scores so you can see if they’re in line with your competitors, or out of the norm, and what action that means you need to take. 

Related reading: SurveyMonkey Benchmarks

Your customers are taking time out of their busy lives to provide you with thoughtful feedback that can significantly improve your business. If you’re not acting on that feedback, it’s wasting both your time and theirs.

Some feedback is easier to act on than other feedback, but it’s important that your customers feel you’re actually listening to what they’re saying. Making real changes based on the feedback that you receive when it’s compelling enough to warrant a shift will help to increase CSAT and your business will thrive as a result. 

Measuring CSAT also helps your business to track its long-term progress.

You can see how changes that you make to the CX or with your product line affect CSAT, so you know what’s working well and what’s not. 

There is no need for your customers to be merely passive recipients of your CX. You should engage them as active participants in the CX improvement process, and this can be done in a number of ways.

Don’t stop at implementing customer feedback. You can close the feedback loop and create an ongoing conversation with customers. Ultimately, you’ll end up with a Voice of the Customer (VoC) programme.

A VoC programme systematically collects, analyses and monitors customer interactions with your brand. It is an ongoing commitment to improving CSAT.

Analysing and reporting on CSAT metrics is crucial for businesses to understand their customers’ needs and expectations. By analysing CSAT data, businesses can identify areas for improvement and opportunities to exceed customer expectations. Reporting on CSAT metrics helps businesses to track progress over time and make data-driven decisions. This continuous process of measuring, analysing and reporting ensures that businesses stay aligned with their customers’ evolving needs and maintain high levels of CSAT.

Here are some best practices for analysing CSAT metrics:

By following these best practices, businesses can effectively measure CSAT, gain valuable insights and implement strategies to improve the overall CX.

There are various tools that businesses can use to measure CSAT. These include:

Using these tools, businesses can effectively measure CSAT, gather valuable customer feedback and implement strategies to improve the overall CX.

The more data you have about your customers, the better equipped your business is to serve them. These CSAT metrics will help you understand how your customers feel about your products, services and experiences. 

By measuring satisfaction KPIs and closely monitoring each metric over time, you can trace the impact of your CX management strategies. With satisfied customers come higher profits, increased loyalty and a better bottom line for your business.

Learn more about improving CSAT with SurveyMonkey’s ultimate guide to the customer satisfaction score. Alternatively, take a look at the CSAT use cases to learn more about how SurveyMonkey can help your organisation.

NPS®, Net Promoter® and Net Promoter Score® are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld.