What is CSAT?

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) measures how happy customers are with a specific interaction — a purchase, a support ticket, an event, an onboarding session. Where NPS measures overall loyalty, CSAT zooms in on the moment.

The classic question is:

"How satisfied were you with [the interaction]?"

answered on a 1–5 scale, where 1 is "Very dissatisfied" and 5 is "Very satisfied".

How the score is calculated

CSAT is the percentage of respondents who picked the top two boxes (4 or 5):

CSAT = (Satisfied responses ÷ Total responses) × 100

| Score | Bucket | |-------|--------| | 4–5 | Satisfied — counted in the score | | 1–3 | Unsatisfied — not counted |

Example

  • 200 responses: 170 picked 4 or 5, 30 picked 1–3
  • 170 ÷ 200 = CSAT of 85%

How to read your score

Industry benchmarks vary, but as a rough guide:

| CSAT | Band | What it suggests | |------|------|------------------| | Below 50% | Poor | Most customers are unhappy. Critical follow-up needed. | | 50–70% | Fair | A meaningful chunk of customers aren't satisfied. | | 70–85% | Good | Solid — most customers feel served. | | 85%+ | Excellent | Top performance for this touchpoint. |

CSAT vs NPS — when to use each

| Use CSAT when… | Use NPS when… | |---------------------|--------------------| | You're measuring a specific interaction | You're measuring overall relationship | | Speed of feedback matters (post-purchase, post-support) | You want a comparable, headline number | | You want to know "did this work?" | You want to know "do they love us?" |

They're complementary — many businesses run both. A typical pattern: post-ticket CSAT for the support team, quarterly NPS for the executive dashboard.

Common pitfalls

  • Scale ambiguity: "Satisfied" means different things to different people. Always pair with a short open-text follow-up for context.
  • Recency bias: results swing with the customer's most recent interaction — don't read week-to-week jitters as trends.
  • Picking the wrong moment: ask too early (before the value is felt) or too late (after they've forgotten) and your data is noise.

In Form Wizard

When you add a rating question with a 1–5 scale, Form Wizard automatically:

  • Tags it as a CSAT question
  • Calculates the percentage who picked 4 or 5
  • Shows the band (Fair / Good / Excellent) at a glance
  • Surfaces an average score and the score distribution

If your scale is 1–7, we calculate a top-box score instead (% who picked 6 or 7). For other scales we fall back to the average rating.

See the NPS methodology article for our other headline scoring methodology.