A customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey helps you understand how customers felt about a specific interaction or transaction, such as contacting support or making a purchase. You can use CSAT with other metrics to understand your customers’ experience with your brand.
Continue reading to learn about templates, features, and business apps that can help you build and analyze your CSAT survey in SurveyMonkey.
New to measuring CSAT? Learn more about CSAT and how it works >>
Typical CSAT surveys include a single-choice CSAT question and a follow-up open-text question. The CSAT question looks like the example below:
Overall, how would you rate your satisfaction with our company?
Responses to this question determine your CSAT score. Typically, responses in the top 2 categories (Very Satisfied or Somewhat Satisfied) are considered positive. You calculate your CSAT score by adding the number of responses to Very Satisfied or Somewhat Satisfied, dividing it by the total number of responses, and multiplying the result by 100.
There are a few ways to build a CSAT survey in SurveyMonkey.
SurveyMonkey provides several free, customizable templates to help you start measuring customer satisfaction. Check out our popular CSAT survey template that you can customize for your use case.
Write a prompt and let AI build a custom survey for you. Build with AI can create a survey that uses a CSAT question and other customized questions based on your company’s needs.
If you’re writing a prompt for a CSAT survey:
Create your survey from scratch. Add your own questions, apply question settings, apply logic, and customize the design.
We recommend you use the Matrix/Rating Scale question type for your CSAT question. Check the box to Make this a single-row rating scale. This adds weights to the answer options so you can view and filter by specific scores later. if you use our Salesforce integration (available on Enterprise plans), you can also send these weights to Salesforce.
No matter how you build your CSAT survey, there are guidelines you can follow. Expand the dropdown below to learn more:
Connect your CSAT data to other business apps that you use regularly to automate manual actions and send your data where you need it,
Enterprise plans can use our Salesforce integration to send surveys at key touchpoints and build a single source of truth for customer insights. Use Salesforce to send a CSAT survey after a case is closed, at the end of onboarding, and more.
If you use our Salesforce integration, you can send email invitations to customers after they interact with your support team. For example, you can send your CSAT survey when a support agent changes a case status to Closed.
You can also build reporting in Salesforce to turn survey insights into clear and comprehensive dashboards.
You can send your survey using any of our collectors, as long as they’re available on your plan. Here are a few options that work well with CSAT surveys:
| Collector type | What it is | Key features |
| Email collector | Create an email collector to send a customized survey invitation to contacts. Emails are a great format for transactional CSAT surveys, which you send after someone interacts with your team. | - Embed the first survey question - Send reminder emails - Track email analytics - Track respondents with custom variables |
| Web link collector | Copy a custom survey link to send however you want. Survey links are flexible and let you choose the right time and place to share your survey. | - Customize the survey URL ending - Customize the domain - Track respondents with custom variables |
TIP! If you’re sending a transactional survey (for example, after someone completes a purchase or calls your support team), you can use a web link collector and turn on the Multiple responses setting. This way, you don’t have to create a new web link for respondents who take your survey more than once.
Once you’ve collected responses, you can start analyzing results. Here are a few tips to help you understand your results:
To calculate your actual CSAT score, you can use our CSAT Calculator. This number is calculated as the total number of Very Satisfied and Somewhat Satisfied responses divided by the total number of responses then multiplied by 100, or: (Number of satisfied customers (4 and 5) / Number of survey responses) x 100 = % of satisfied customers
Example: 500 people responded to a CSAT survey. 68 were Very Satisfied (score 5), and 74 were Somewhat Satisfied (score 4).
- Add the number of Satisfied and Somewhat Satisfied responses to get 142.
- Divide 142 by the total number of responses (500). You get 0.284 .
- Multiply .284 by 100 to get 28.4%. This is your CSAT score.
The equation would look like this: (142 / 500) x 100 = 28.4%
If you used a single-row matrix/rating scale, you can view the average rating in your Question Summaries. However, this rating doesn’t use the same calculation as the CSAT formula above.
You can use filters and compare rules to understand how people who chose a certain score responded to other questions in your survey. You can also filter by open-ended responses to identify specific keywords and phrases in your results.
Use compare rules to view two or more answer options side by side. Compare rules can help you view responses to other questions in your survey based on the CSAT option they chose.
Sentiment Analysis can help you understand the emotion behind your open-text responses. You can also filter responses by sentiment to gauge how respondents’ emotions guided their responses.
Ready to build your CSAT program? Start creating your survey today!