Definition
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) measures how satisfied customers are with a specific interaction, product, or service, usually by asking them to rate it on a short scale. CSAT is the percentage of respondents who chose a satisfied rating (commonly the top one or two of a five-point scale), making it a direct, transactional gauge of a single moment.
Key takeaways
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) measures how satisfied customers are with a specific interaction, product, or service, usually by asking them to rate it on a short scale. CSAT is the percentage of respondents who chose a satisfied rating (commonly the top one or two of a five-point scale), making it a direct, transactional gauge of a single moment.
- CSAT is transactional by design: it is surveyed immediately after a discrete event — a support ticket resolved, a feature used, an order delivered — so the rating attaches to that moment while it is fresh.
- Planoda surfaces transactional satisfaction signals next to the operational metrics behind them, so a dip in CSAT can be traced to the workflow or response time that caused it.
CSAT is transactional by design: it is surveyed immediately after a discrete event — a support ticket resolved, a feature used, an order delivered — so the rating attaches to that moment while it is fresh. This makes it sharper than relationship-level metrics for pinpointing exactly which interactions delight or frustrate customers, and for closing the loop quickly when a rating is low.
The arithmetic is simple but the scale choice matters. Most teams report the 'top-box' (or top-two-box) percentage rather than an average, because a mean blurs the distinction between many neutral ratings and a polarized split of delighted and angry customers. Always pair the number with the response rate, since low or self-selected response makes the figure unreliable.
CSAT, NPS, and CES (Customer Effort Score) answer different questions: CSAT asks 'were you satisfied with this?', NPS asks 'would you recommend us?', and CES asks 'how hard was it?'. Mature teams use them together — CSAT for moment-to-moment quality, NPS for overall loyalty trend.
Planoda surfaces transactional satisfaction signals next to the operational metrics behind them, so a dip in CSAT can be traced to the workflow or response time that caused it.
Related terms
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)Net Promoter Score measures customer loyalty from a single question: how likely are you to recommend us, on a 0–10 scale. Respondents scoring 9–10 are promoters, 7–8 passives, and 0–6 detractors. NPS is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors, yielding a number from −100 to +100.
- Customer Health ScoreA customer health score is a composite metric that blends behavioral and relationship signals — product usage, support history, engagement, sentiment, and payment status — into a single indicator of how likely an account is to renew, expand, or churn. It gives customer success teams an early, prioritized view of which accounts need attention.
- Vanity MetricA vanity metric is a number that looks impressive but does not inform decisions or correlate with real success — total registered users, page views, or app downloads. It tends to only go up, lacks context for action, and flatters rather than informs, making it a poor basis for strategy compared to actionable, comparable metrics.
- SLAAn SLA (service-level agreement) is a defined commitment to respond to or resolve certain work within a set time — for example, acknowledging urgent bugs within an hour. SLAs turn vague expectations into measurable targets, hold teams accountable, and signal which work the clock is running on so the most time-sensitive items aren't lost.
- Retention RateRetention rate is the percentage of customers (or users) who remain active over a period — the mirror image of churn. Calculated as customers retained divided by customers at the period's start, it measures whether a product delivers durable, repeated value rather than a one-time hit, and underpins almost every other growth metric.