CSAT — Customer satisfaction
What is customer satisfaction?
CSAT is the metric that measures how satisfied a customer was with one specific interaction. It is asked right after resolving, usually on a one-to-five scale or with a thumbs up or down, and expressed as the percentage of positive answers over the total.
Also: satisfaction score
CSAT measures a conversation, NPS measures the relationship
They measure different things and get confused constantly. CSAT asks "did this answer help?" right after giving it; NPS asks "would you recommend us?" about the whole relationship. A customer can give support five stars and still not recommend you, because they think the product is expensive.
Why it matters
What it means for a SaaS
It is the only support metric that asks the customer rather than inferring. Every other one measures what the team does; CSAT measures whether it was any use. Which is why its value sits less in the number and more in the comments people write when they score low, which cost nothing and which nobody reads.
Customer satisfaction in detail
How it is calculated
Positive answers divided by total answers, as a percentage. Watch the denominator: it is answers received, not conversations. Whoever does not fill in the survey is not counted, and that is the main bias.
The bias of who answers
The people who answer are mostly the very happy and the very angry. The middle, usually the majority, does not answer. So your CSAT is the satisfaction of the people with an opinion strong enough to press a button.
When to ask
Immediately after closing, and only once per conversation. Asking days later measures what people remember; asking on every message wears people out and drives the response rate down until the metric stops meaning anything.
What to do with the negatives
Read them one by one. A 90% CSAT with twenty negative comments a month holds more useful information in those twenty comments than in the 90%. Group them by cause and most of them usually point at the same place.
How Intake handles it
Frequently asked questions
What is a good CSAT?
In software support it usually sits above 85%, but comparing across companies misleads because it depends on the scale, the moment you ask and the response rate. It is more useful to watch your own trend and segment by question type.
What is the difference between CSAT and NPS?
CSAT measures one specific interaction and is asked right after; NPS measures the relationship with the company and is asked periodically. They answer different questions and are not interchangeable.
Does CSAT drop when an AI agent answers?
It depends on whether it resolves. When it closes the case, the score usually rises because the answer arrives sooner. When it does not resolve and reaching a person is hard on top of that, it drops further than having nothing would, because the customer feels an obstacle was put in the way.
Related terms
These usually come up in the same conversation.
Satisfaction per agent
Satisfaction per agent is CSAT broken down by the person who handled each conversation. It is used to see who needs support and what is working, and it is one of the metrics that does the most damage when used for anything else.
NPS — Net Promoter Score
NPS measures how willing a customer is to recommend a company. It is asked on a zero-to-ten scale and calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors (zero to six) from the percentage of promoters (nine and ten). The result runs from −100 to 100, and the sevens and eights do not count.
CES — Customer effort
CES measures how much effort it took the customer to get their problem solved. It is asked with a statement along the lines of "the company made it easy for me" and an agreement scale, and it starts from a specific idea: making things easy for customers keeps them better than trying to wow them.
FRT — First response time
First response time is how long passes between a customer sending their question and receiving the first reply from a person. It measures the initial wait and it is the metric that weighs most when a customer judges whether support is good.
FCR — First contact resolution
First contact resolution is the percentage of questions resolved in the first interaction, without the customer having to write again and without the conversation passing to another person. It is the metric that best summarizes whether the team has what it needs to answer within reach.
Ticket backlog
The backlog is the set of questions open and still unresolved at a given moment. More than its size, what gets watched is its trend: if more questions come in than get closed, the backlog grows, and it grows cumulatively even when the daily difference is small.
