CSAT, the Public Domain Customer-Satisfaction Question
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, May 29, 2009
Many organizations use the following question, often called CSAT, to measure customer satisfaction:
What is your overall satisfaction with our company?
1. Very dissatisfied
2. Somewhat dissatisfied
3. Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied
4. Somewhat satisfied
5. Very satisfied
This question has the twin advantages of brevity and familiarity; it is recognized and easily answered by most respondents. Any adult who has taken a survey has most likely answered a form of this question before.
CSAT is traditionally analyzed by tracking over time the percentage of "Satisfied" respondents, i.e., the percent who answer 4 or 5. Many organizations are happy to see that 70-80% of their customers are satisfied and feel little sense of urgency to make improvements so that satisfaction exceeds this level. When phrased as above, the satisfaction question ignores significant research into how to structure rating scales to provide the greatest reliability and validity (see the abstract of "The Optimal Length of Rating Scales to Maximize Reliability and Validity" by Jon Krosnick and Alex Tahk, which studied 706 tests). The CSAT question should instead be asked in one of the two following ways, with no numbers presented:
What is your overall satisfaction with our company?
- Not at all satisfied
- Slightly satisfied
- Moderately satisfied
- Very satisfied
- Completely satisfied
Or:
What is your overall satisfaction with our company?
- Completely dissatisfied
- Mostly dissatisfied
- Somewhat dissatisfied
- Neither satisfied or dissatisfied
- Somewhat satisfied
- Mostly satisfied
- Completely satisfied
Mere satisfaction alone is not enough: the key top-line number is the percent of respondents reporting themselves to be "Completely satisfied". This is a far more important metric. In the seminal paper, "Why Satisfied Customers Defect" by Thomas O. Jones and W. Earl Sasser, Jr. (covered in this description of the "folk" Apostle Model), the authors report that for Xerox completely satisfied customers (rating of 5) were six times more likely to repurchase over the next 18 months than somewhat satisfied customers (ratings of 3-4).
Your first survey to report this statistic will certainly report a much lower percentage than you had hoped for, giving you a meaningful metric to track your performance against. Use the top-two percentage on the five-point scale for marketing purposes, and to compare yourself to other firms' self-reported numbers, but use the "completely satisfied" percentage to measure the results of your initiatives and innovation.
If satisfaction is just one part of the customer experience and loyalty survey you are conducting, the CSAT question can be an effective measure.
By itself, though, a single question can be very volatile from measurement period to measurement period. As a result, most professionally commissioned customer-satisfaction reports provide a customer-satisfaction index, derived from two to four questions. The American Customer Satisfaction Index is the most famous of these and is useful if the principle concern of your research is customer satisfaction.