What Is a CSAT score?

A CSAT score is a performance measure of a customer’s satisfaction with an organisation and/or its products and services.

It is different to loyalty (Net Promoter Score) in the sense that it is a measurement of the here and now, and thus takes into consideration the present and past performance. Whereas loyalty is very much a future gazing measure.

CSAT scores can be used to give a measure of the overall performance of an organisation and/or its products and services, or it can be used to separately measure all the different customer touchpoints.

That said without a doubt the most famous CSAT measure of all time is that of overall satisfaction:

Overall, how satisfied are you with… on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is not at all satisfied and 10 is extremely satisfied?

Opinion differs on the right scale to use when measuring CSAT, at B2B International we are very much in favour of using a 10-point scale. It is the most commonly used scale in the world and from an analysis and statistical point of views allows you to do a lot more with the data.

Other options are a 5-point and 7-point scale which are traditional used in paper surveys, more so for layout reasons than anything else. Some people also like the fact that these scales provide a midpoint. However, as less and less surveys are being done on paper these scales are becoming less popular.

For the remainder of this introduction we will discuss our favoured 10-point CSAT measurement.