Understanding what your customers think about your business is key to building long-term relationships. Two common metrics to gauge customer sentiment are Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS). They serve different purposes, but both provide valuable insights that help businesses refine their CX strategies.
But improvement isn’t about collecting data — it’s about using insights to build better relationships, improve quality, and drive growth.
The metric you choose matters less than how you use the feedback to drive real change. The key to improvement isn’t just collecting scores — it’s taking meaningful action.
This guide explores CSAT vs NPS: their key differences, when to use each, and how to use them effectively for business growth.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is more flexible than NPS and isn’t owned by any particular organisation. It allows businesses to adapt the question format and scoring system to their needs.
Customers are asked: “How satisfied were you with [specific experience]?” They respond using a scale (e.g., 1–3, 1–5, 1–7 or 1–10), often with response labels like “Very Unsatisfied” to “Very Satisfied.”
In regulated industries like financial services, CSAT is also used for compliance and performance benchmarking. See the FCA’s latest service metrics for how it’s assessed in financial services.
CSAT is much more flexible than NPS. There’s no standard definition, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It does mean that it’s completely flexible for you to use and adapt how you want it to work.
— Guy Letts, CEO at CustomerSure
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Flexible – Can measure both loyalty and interactions. | ‘Satisfied?’ is weaker than ‘Recommend?’ – Doesn’t provide the same advocacy insight as NPS. |
| Simple for customers – Easy to understand and answer. | Better for retention than referrals – CSAT focuses on fixing issues rather than driving recommendations. |
| Simple for staff – Easy to implement and interpret, making it accessible for teams across departments. |
CSAT is calculated using the formula: CSAT = (Total positive responses / Total responses) x 100
For example, if 200 out of 260 respondents rate their experience as 4 or 5 (in 1-5 scale), the CSAT score would be: (200/260) x 100 = 77%
While calculating CSAT is straightforward, using it as a target can be misleading. Since satisfaction is subjective, focusing solely on increasing the score may not always improve customer experience. Instead, setting better, objective targets leads to meaningful improvements. Find out why setting a CSAT target can backfire — and what to do instead.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) was pioneered by Fred Reichheld and his team, who discovered a strong correlation between a specific question and business growth.
Customers answer: “What is the likelihood that you recommend company X to a friend or colleague?” using a scale from 0 to 10. Responses fall into three groups:
NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. Some companies use a 1 to 5 scale for NPS, which can still provide meaningful insights. Learn more about calculating NPS on a 1-to-5 scale.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Popular & familiar methodology – Widely recognised. | Measures loyalty but not service quality – Doesn’t capture experience specifics. |
| Simple for customers– A single, easy-to-answer question. | Question frustrates new customers – It assumes they have enough experience to recommend. |
| ‘Recommend?’ question is more challenging than ‘Satisfied?’ – Forces a deeper response. | NPS calculation is not well understood – Many businesses misinterpret its meaning. |
| Highlights importance of follow-up – Helps businesses focus on post-feedback actions. | Doesn’t tell you what’s important to customers – Needs follow-up questions to diagnose issues. |
The best thing about Net Promoter Score is that the methodology emphasises the importance of closing the loop—that is, following up on whatever your customers feed back to you. That should be a huge advantage, but what I see is that many people fall down here. They don’t get the benefits that they should because they focus too much on just the measurement of Net Promoter Score and not enough on the follow-up.
Guy Letts, CEO at CustomerSure
NPS is calculated using the formula: NPS = % Promoters - % Detractors
For example, if you survey 500 customers and receive:
Your NPS score would be: 60 - 20 = 40%
Explore a detailed breakdown of how to calculate NPS.
While CSAT and NPS focus on satisfaction and loyalty, Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how easy it is for customers to complete a specific interaction, like getting support or making a purchase. A low-effort experience often leads to higher satisfaction and loyalty, making CES a useful complement when evaluating service efficiency. Find out more about the benefit of understanding customer effort.
Customer Effort score is useful when used in conjunction with CSAT, NPS, or both, because it helps to drive improvements in customer experience.
Both CSAT and NPS provide useful insights, but they serve different purposes in measuring customer experience. CSAT helps businesses understand short-term satisfaction by focusing on specific transactions, while NPS provides a broader view of brand loyalty and advocacy.
| Feature | CSAT | NPS |
|---|---|---|
| Measures | Satisfaction with a specific experience | Overall customer loyalty |
| Timing | Immediately after an interaction | Periodic (e.g., quarterly or annually) |
| Question Type | “How satisfied were you?” | “How likely are you to recommend?” |
| Scale | Typically 1-5 or 1-7 | 0-10 scale |
| Calculation | % of positive responses | % Promoters - % Detractors |
| Best For | Short-term insights | Long-term customer sentiment |
While CSAT is excellent for identifying immediate customer concerns or weaknesses in operational performance that need to be improved, it is not designed to measure long-term commitment. NPS, on the other hand, helps businesses assess customer loyalty.
In practice, to work successfully both CSAT and NPS require at least one additional free-text question to be asked to allow customers to comment on their experience. The score and the comment then work hand in hand to indicate an area of strength or weakness, and also its severity, (depending on the score) and what corrective action is required (according to the comment).
Many businesses use both CSAT and NPS together to gain a comprehensive view of customer experience.
By combining both metrics, businesses can balance short-term customer sentiment with broader loyalty insights. This dual approach allows organisations to fix immediate pain points while also ensuring long-term customer advocacy.
The best metric for your business depends on what you want to achieve:
Whichever you pick, ensure it’s used consistently across your organisation to measure and improve satisfaction. Most importantly, design a strategy for responding immediately to at-risk customers, turning insights into action before it’s too late.
You can learn more about customer satisfaction metrics and their impact here.
The key thing is to think about your customer on the receiving end of this question and choose the question that’s going to be most appropriate for them at that point in dealing with you. Is the question going to seem awkward, or is it going to feel appropriate?
— Guy Letts, CEO at CustomerSure
At CustomerSure, we believe that collecting feedback is only the first step. What truly makes the difference is how you act on it.
We help businesses turn customer feedback into actionable improvements that drive loyalty, satisfaction, and retention. Our clients effortlessly gather CSAT, NPS (and CES) measurements across multiple channels, but most importantly they make sure they take the right actions to drive up loyalty and customer experience.
Our Voice of the Customer (VoC) platform makes it easy to:
Ready to make the most of your customer feedback? Book a discovery call to see how CustomerSure makes CSAT and NPS (or CES) measurement effortless.
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