Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores are a vital KPI that provide insights into customers’ overall satisfaction with your product, service, or experience. Measuring CSAT tells you how well you meet customer expectations, while helping you identify places for improvement.
This article guides you through the fundamentals of building and analyzing CSAT surveys in Maze.
In this article:
- What's CSAT?
- How to measure CSAT
- Step 1: Planning a CSAT survey
- Step 2: Building a CSAT survey in Maze
- Step 3: Distributing your maze
- Step 4: Results and reporting
- Additional resources
What's CSAT?
A Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score is an indicator used to measure a customer's satisfaction with a product, service, or experience. It's a straightforward way to gauge customer satisfaction related to a specific interaction or overall satisfaction with a product.
It’s typically obtained through a 1-question survey such as: "How would you rate your experience?"
CSAT surveys allow you to:
- Get a clear understanding of customer satisfaction
- Identify areas of improvement
- Measure the impact of specific changes or initiatives
- Benchmark against industry standards or competitors
How to measure CSAT
The responses are often on a Likert scale, ranging from 1 to 5, where 1 might indicate "very unsatisfied" and 5 "very satisfied." This numeric data is crucial for quantifying customer satisfaction in a tangible way.
Unlike NPS (Net Promoter Score), there’s no single consensual formula for calculating CSAT.
Here’s the most common method:
- Collect responses: Responses to the satisfaction question are collected, usually on a scale (e.g., 1–5 or 1–10).
- Identify positive responses: Decide which responses are considered positive. For a 5-point scale, this might be responses of 4 (satisfied) and 5 (very satisfied).
- Calculate the percentage: The CSAT score is then calculated as the percentage of positive responses out of the total responses.
The formula used to calculate the CSAT score would then be:
For instance, if 70 out of 100 respondents gave a rating of 4 or 5, the CSAT score would be 70%.
Depending on your team’s preferences and the response volume, you may choose to calculate the CSAT score using either the average or median of all responses. The average calculation is ideal for larger response volumes and normally-distributed data, as it captures detailed variations in satisfaction levels. Conversely, the median calculation tends to be more appropriate for smaller response volumes or skewed distributions, as it minimizes the impact of outliers and gives a clear midpoint of customer satisfaction.
Most importantly, it’s crucial to maintain consistency in your calculations over time, regardless of the calculation method. Consistent methodology allows results to be comparable, allowing you to accurately identify trends and track changes in customer satisfaction.
Step 1: Planning a CSAT survey
Define your goals
Begin by clarifying what you aim to learn from the survey. Understand your primary concerns—whether it's assessing overall satisfaction, gathering feedback on a recent product change, or identifying areas for improvement.
It’s often helpful to consider questions that directly address the functionality and usability of your product. This helps in understanding how well the product meets the needs and expectations of your users.
Some common questions to consider include:
- How satisfied are customers with your product or service?
- How would customers rate the ease of use of the product?
- What specific features do customers appreciate the most?
- Are there any areas where customers feel improvements could be made?
Determine the cadence
Determine whether the survey will be ongoing or a one-off.
One-off surveys are typically used to gather feedback about a specific interaction or event—for instance, after a major product release. This approach helps you monitor the impact of a specific change on customer satisfaction.
On the other hand, running surveys on an ongoing cadence (e.g. quarterly, or once/twice a year) allows you to track satisfaction trends over time.
Step 2: Building a CSAT survey in Maze
You can use an unmoderated maze to build your CSAT survey.
Here are a few ready-made templates you can use: maze.co/templates/satisfaction-survey
In this survey, you’ll be collecting quantitative feedback using an Opinion Scale block. This allows you to calculate the score once results start coming in.
If you would like to collect additional qualitative feedback linked to the score, you can include one or more Open Question blocks as well.
Step 3: Distributing your maze
Prompt
While there are several ways to distribute your maze to participants, adding it as a prompt directly to your website is particularly fitting to get contextual feedback.
Learn more about in-product prompts
Reach
If you have the contacts of the customers you want to gather feedback from, you can also share your maze using an email campaign.
Step 4: Results and reporting
At the moment, it’s not possible to automatically calculate CSAT via Maze. We only show averages of scores in results.
If you just need to keep an eye on the average calculation at any given point in time, you can use the Maze results and reports to monitor it.
However, other use cases may require exporting the results and completing the analysis using a third-party tool:
- If using a CSAT calculation method that isn’t based on averages
- If tracking the evolution of the score over time
- If doing more advanced results segmentation—for instance, by user group or persona
Learn more about exporting your results
Additionally, reports make it easy to present and share your results data. They’re automatically generated for every live maze tested with at least one participant.