Customer Satisfaction Score — a short post-resolution rating (often 1–5 or thumbs) that gauges how a specific interaction felt.
CSAT measures how a customer felt about one specific interaction, captured right after it ends. It’s a transactional, point-in-time signal — distinct from loyalty metrics like NPS, which ask how someone feels about your brand overall.
How it’s measured
Send a one-click prompt at resolution — a 1–5 scale, a five-emoji face row, or a simple thumbs up/down. The common formula treats the top responses as “satisfied”: CSAT % = (satisfied responses ÷ total responses) × 100. With a 1–5 scale, “satisfied” usually means the 4s and 5s. Always report it alongside the response count, since a 95% score drawn from eight ratings says little.
Why it matters
CSAT is a direct read on support quality, and it’s sliceable — by agent, channel, topic, or time of day — so it points to where to dig. A drop on billing tickets is a different problem than a drop on a single overnight shift. It pairs naturally with operational metrics like first response time and resolution time.
Common pitfalls
- Low response rates that skew toward the very happy and the very angry.
- Surveying too often, so customers tune the prompt out.
- Treating the score as a target to game rather than a signal to investigate — read the verbatim comments, not just the number.
For example, an e-commerce store appends a thumbs up/down to each resolution email; slicing the result by topic surfaces that returns drag the score down, pointing the team at a policy fix rather than agent coaching. The collection mechanics are in measuring CSAT without annoying your customers.
How Cherryrise handles it
Cherryrise can attach a one-click rating to resolution replies and roll the results into the reporting dashboards, where you can filter by agent, channel, or tag. Read it next to resolution time and SLA attainment: a fast resolution with a low rating usually means the answer closed the ticket without actually solving the problem, which is exactly the case the score is there to catch.