The per-conversation satisfaction score — what it measures, the formula, and how to keep it honest.
CSAT. CSAT (customer satisfaction score) is a measure of how satisfied customers are with a specific interaction, collected by a short survey sent as the conversation ends. Customers rate the interaction on a fixed scale — commonly 1 to 5 — and CSAT is the percentage of responses that land in the top tiers of that scale.
A CSAT survey fires at the end of a conversation, while the experience is still fresh: inline in the chat widget as a chat closes, or by a follow-up email with a rating link after an email thread resolves. The customer picks a score and, optionally, leaves a comment. Tools like inrelay’s built-in CSAT surveys send the ask automatically per channel, so nobody has to remember to request feedback.
Two properties of CSAT are easy to miss. First, it is transactional: it grades one conversation, not the relationship — that is what separates it from NPS. Second, it is opt-in, and the people most likely to answer are the delighted and the furious. The score you see is drawn from the loud ends of the distribution, which is why the response rate belongs next to the score whenever you report it.
Speed metrics can’t tell a fast answer from a fast wrong answer. A team can post excellent response times while quietly sending customers away unhappy, and without a satisfaction signal the first symptom is churn you never see coming. CSAT is the earliest per-conversation warning that a policy, a template or a missing help article is costing you goodwill — and the comments attached to low scores usually name the exact fix.
CSAT formula. CSAT = (satisfied responses ÷ total survey responses) × 100, where a response counts as satisfied when it falls in the top tiers of the scale — a 4 or 5 on a five-point scale. A CSAT of 80 means eight of ten respondents rated the conversation positively.
Read the number in segments — per channel, per period, per topic — rather than as one lifetime score, because a rough week on live chat disappears inside a good quarter of email. And respect small samples: with ten responses, each one moves the score ten points, so the trend over weeks means more than any single figure. If the score climbs while the response rate collapses, treat the climb as suspect — you may simply have stopped hearing from the unhappy.
Give your customers faster answers and your team their evenings back.
Desktop and mobile. Free for solo.