15 customer satisfaction KPIs: Key metrics & how to measure

Measuring customer satisfaction allows you to comprehensively record the customer experience (CX). Using different customer satisfaction KPIs, you can fully understand how your customers respond to your brand. These metrics help measure customer loyalty, identify at-risk customers, reduce churn, and attract new customers. 

Collecting feedback allows you to monitor your customer experience metrics with concrete data. Responding to this feedback helps you improve your customer touchpoints and create a better customer experience.

As you streamline the customer journey at every touchpoint, your customers will report higher satisfaction. From there, you’ll experience higher profits, decreased churn, and happier customers—what’s not to love?

Keep reading to learn the 14 customer satisfaction KPIs you need to track for business success.

Customer satisfaction KPIs are metrics that measure how happy customers are with a company’s products, services, or interactions.

Measuring customer satisfaction KPIs and acting on that data is a surefire way to improve the customer experience. In turn, it boosts customer satisfaction and enhances everything from retention rates to overall revenue.

In fact, 91% of customers who have a positive experience with your brand will recommend your company.  According to a study by Temkin Group, around 77% of customers would recommend a brand to a friend after having a single positive experience.

Customer satisfaction is a key indicator of a business’s success in meeting the needs and desires of its target audience. Achieving high levels of customer satisfaction requires a deep understanding of customer preferences, pain points, and expectations. 

The bottom line is to increase customer satisfaction and build a sustainable, profitable business.

Measuring customer satisfaction is the key to success. Clear, quantifiable metrics will offer you the insight you need to monitor and develop a strategy to improve customer satisfaction, leading to many other benefits. Take a look at the top benefits of measuring (and acting) on customer satisfaction KPIs.

Measuring customer satisfaction can help you uncover exactly why your customers are satisfied or dissatisfied. Understanding the customer experience can help identify areas of high effort within the customer journey, allowing for targeted improvements.

Perhaps they love your customer service team but find your products mediocre. Maybe they find your services helpful but just hate your billing process. Or maybe they love your customer experience overall but have issues with just one specific product—an easy fix to keep them delighted.

Whatever the problems are, you can’t fix them until you know about them. You can capitalize on your strengths when you know exactly what they are. 

It’s expensive to acquire new customers—much more costly than retaining your existing ones. It costs 5 to 25 times as much to gain a new customer than to keep one you already have.

The more satisfied your customers are, the less likely they will go to a competitor, and your retention rates will increase as a result of improved customer satisfaction. 

What do Apple and Costco have in common? A base of loyal customers that consistently choose their products and services.

Customers who are satisfied with your service or products are more likely to have high levels of brand loyalty. Just think of the legions of Apple loyalists out there who purchase everything the brand makes.

Create an experience that satisfies customers, and you can build a company they think of and return to in a time of need.

Customers share their experiences with brands when they’re exceptional, either positively or negatively. And with the power of social media, their complaints and praise can be shared widely and amplified. One negative customer interaction, often stemming from poor customer service, can have far-reaching consequences.

Maintaining a positive brand reputation is easier when you provide an exceptional customer experience. Customers will tell their friends and colleagues about how much they appreciate your service, giving your business free and effective advertising. 

Revenue is an undeniable metric that all businesses track. The good news is that measuring, tracking, and improving customer satisfaction can increase revenue. A “totally satisfied customer” contributes 2.6 times more revenue than a “somewhat satisfied customer.”

Your business will see increased revenues by improving customer satisfaction and, by proxy, boosting CLV and reducing churn rates. And when you have a higher CLV, you can spend more money to acquire customers—bringing in new business and boosting profits further. 

Customers who are satisfied not only make a purchase but also develop a lasting relationship with a brand, resulting in continued loyalty over the long term.

These customers tend to return for repeat business, recommend the brand to others, and actively engage with the company's offerings. By consistently meeting or exceeding their expectations, businesses can cultivate a loyal customer base that contributes to sustainable growth and positive word-of-mouth marketing.

Many businesses assume to know how changes will affect customer satisfaction or that if business is good, then everything must be fine—but those assumptions are often wrong.

Measuring satisfaction levels by asking your customers directly helps you make data-informed decisions about where to go. The importance of customer satisfaction is too great to leave those assumptions unmeasured and untested. 

Customer experience teams use customer satisfaction surveys to measure touchpoint satisfaction. Consistently low ratings can tip off CX managers to customer journey or product issues.

It’s common for many businesses to focus first on their own priorities. But to really satisfy your customers’ needs, you should prioritize a customer-centric approach.

That means product testing. Testing helps you understand customer sentiment about upcoming changes and product launches and how they’ll impact your business.

Beginning by thinking about customers instead of the bottom line will result in an overall better customer experience. That’s what will leave them satisfied and highly loyal to you. 

Providing great customer service gives your business an advantage over others in your industry.

In fact, 89% of companies with customer experiences that are significantly above average perform better financially than their competitors.

Businesses use different types of CSAT metrics to understand their audience that include:

By utilizing these customer satisfaction metrics, businesses can gain a comprehensive understanding of their customers’ experiences and identify specific areas for improvement.

Customer satisfaction isn’t a single score. It’s a merger of KPIs that we’ll explain here.

The Customer Satisfaction Score allows businesses to directly measure customer satisfaction with their company, products, or services. It aims to monitor overall satisfaction while also identifying areas where an organization could improve its offerings.

You can compare your CSAT to industry benchmarks to determine how your company is doing against competitors. This metric can help you monitor and improve customer retention and build better customer relationships.

A CSAT survey asks users, “How would you rate your overall satisfaction with [Company/Product/Service]?” Respondents can choose from a scale of 1 (very unsatisfied) to 5 (very satisfied).

You can measure CSAT with the following formula: 

The Net Promoter Score is a metric used to monitor levels of customer loyalty. Brands worldwide consider measuring NPS to be the leading method of tracking customer loyalty.

Measuring brand loyalty with NPS allows your brand to trace how customers respond to your business. As you implement strategies to improve the customer experience, you can track how satisfaction increases by routinely taking this loyalty metric.

Using an NPS survey to measure loyalty is useful as the survey is simple and effective. Businesses only need to ask a close variant of, “How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague.” Answers can range on a scale from 1-10. 

Respondents are organized into three groups:

You can use an NPS calculator or the following formula to find your NPS.

Benchmark your score against your competitors or industry average to see how your customers feel about your brand.

Customer Effort Score measures the relative effort it takes for a customer to complete a certain interaction with your company. It aims to record effort at important customer touchpoints to streamline the customer experience.

If customers feel that interacting with your business, whether talking to support or buying something, is too difficult, they simply won’t do it. Reducing the effort that customers have to exhibit will lead to a smooth, frictionless experience.

You can trigger a CES survey when a customer interacts with a core touchpoint. A CES survey will ask, “[Company] made it easy to [touchpoint].” Respondents choose a response from 1 (strongly agree) to 5 (strongly disagree).

Companies can use the following formula to get a fixed CES score.

By taking action on customer feedback, businesses can improve the customer experience at each touchpoint, reduce effort, and boost overall satisfaction. Customers prefer brands that make their lives easier and reduce their effort in interactions.

A company’s customer retention rate is a measure of how effective your business is at keeping customers from churning.

If your customers are happy enough to continue buying, they likely feel satisfied with your products and service. On the other hand, lower rates could signify that your customers feel disappointed with your business.

By measuring your retention rates, you can determine if your customer experience management strategies are having a positive effect. Improving customer loyalty and retention can help to improve profits and boost customer lifetime value.

You can measure the customer retention rate by using the following formula:

First contact resolution measures how well customer support resolves issues the first time a customer makes contact. Customers want you to solve their problems fast and without bouncing them around to several other departments or representatives. 

Here’s how to measure FCR:

Customer lifetime value measures the amount of revenue a customer produces across their entire lifetime with your company. Every purchase a customer makes from their first to their last contributes to their CLV. 

A customer with a high average CLV could suggest that the business has customers who routinely come back to purchase again. Low CLVs may signify that customers purchase once but never again. If the latter is true, your products and services may not be meeting customer expectations.

Monitoring and improving your CLV will help increase your revenue while decreasing customer churn. Here’s how to calculate customer lifetime value:

You can calculate CLV for specific segments, individual customers, or your entire business. 

First response time measures the number of minutes, hours, or days that it takes for a service agent to respond to a customer’s first request or ticket submission. It can be calculated in business hours or general hours, depending on the company’s priorities and goals.

To measure FRT, use the following equation: 

The first response to a customer is crucial to establishing trust and a positive rapport. Though each company has its own goals, here are a few benchmarks to consider:

Average time to resolution is how long it takes, on average, for your team to solve a customer’s issue and close a ticket. It helps you understand how efficiently you’re solving customers’ issues.

Here’s how to measure average resolution time:

Average time to resolution is usually measured in terms of hours, and often, it counts business hours as opposed to real-time hours. If you’re wondering what your goal should be, consider that the industry average is 8.85 business hours, according to MetricNet. Even so, numbers range widely. 

Repeat purchase rate measures the percentage of customers who make several purchases from a business. Since repeat customers are often responsible for a large portion of annual revenue in many industries, this metric can be very important.

Calculating repeat purchase rates is simple. Follow this equation:

Customer health score is a rating that measures a customer’s satisfaction with your brand and services or product. It is a good indicator of a customer’s likelihood of renewing or expanding services or products. 

Customer health is an assessment of engagement and satisfaction. From this assessment, you assign a ranking like A, B, C, or D or points, like 1-100, that reflect internal standards. 

This metric is a good way to quickly assess account health. Customer support teams know to intervene with a D-rated client ready to cancel their subscription rather than chasing down unresponsive yet satisfied customers intent on renewing.

Social media is made for engagement, sharing, talking, and commenting. It enables one’s opinion to be known to the rest of the world.

Around 2.82 billion people use social media. And of those 2.82 billion people, some may be your customers. So, what are your customers saying about your business?

You can leverage this function to gather social media sentiment about your brand, monitoring tagged posts, post responses, and direct messages. So, in your efforts to collect feedback from your customers, social media is a great place to be.

Customer complaints are critical feedback based on an interaction, product or service experience, or brand perception. 

Critical feedback is especially important to monitor because most customers who have poor experiences don’t complain about the experience. They just switch when it gets too bad.

Complaints, no matter how many or few, are a warning sign that something is wrong. If one person is having a negative experience, you should assume there are more customers having the same experience. Without actively monitoring for poor customer experience, most companies don’t even know they exist, so they can’t improve.

It’s no longer enough to wait for your customers to complain about something before fixing it. Exceptional customer satisfaction has to be proactive, and that starts by regularly asking and listening to what your customers have to say. Monitoring feedback helps you identify sources of dissatisfaction before they become worse. 

Customer reviews are essential to improving customer satisfaction. They give customers insight into how people like them have enjoyed (or disliked) your products so they can judge if they will feel the same way.

Customer reviews have become powerful in determining the success or failure of brand offerings, with around 88% of customers influenced by online reviews when making a purchase decision.

Customers trust reviews from other buyers because they know there’s no incentive for those reviewers to give your business a falsely positive review. They must have truly enjoyed the product to take the time to leave positive feedback. 

They also provide a wealth of information on how customers feel about your products and services. You can use this data to determine what’s working well and what needs improvement in your product offerings and turn that data into actions that improve the customer experience.  

Great customer service looks a little different for every organization. After all, customers don’t expect luxury hotel service when staying in a roadside motel. That’s why there’s no single definition of great customer service. 

However, common points across companies and industries add up to great customer service. They are:

Use a customer service feedback survey to monitor the overall performance of customer service representatives.

What specific outcomes do you aim to achieve with your business? Identifying your company’s short-term and long-term goals is essential, as these objectives will serve as a roadmap for your customer satisfaction initiatives.

For example, are you looking to improve customer retention, increase positive feedback, or enhance overall service quality? Having clear, measurable objectives will enable you to tailor your strategies and assess the effectiveness of your efforts in meeting customer needs and expectations.

Getting actionable results will depend on several things. For example, who are you sending the survey to?

If you’re measuring customer service satisfaction, you should survey customers immediately after their customer support interaction. Sounds simple, right? But who do you send the customer effort score survey to? Net promoter score survey?

Carefully consider your market research objectives. Align your 

Your insights and subsequent initiatives are a direct reflection of your survey questions. Ask the right questions to develop customer satisfaction initiatives that improve the customer journey and build brand loyalty. Ask questions that don’t align with your goals, and beware of the consequences.

To ask the right questions, you can use customer satisfaction survey templates. Templates are a quick and easy way to launch market research. SurveyMonkey templates are written by experts to ensure that you receive actionable insights.

Related reading: 50 customer satisfaction survey questions to strengthen CSAT

You’re measuring customer satisfaction KPIs. Now what?

Analyze your results and prioritize process improvements.

Whether you need to improve your processes, implement new technology, or just respond to customers’ emails faster, customer satisfaction feedback can help drive lasting action.

Additionally, set up initiatives to keep a pulse on customer satisfaction KPIs.

Tap into Sentiment Analysis to track the most common keywords and phrases your customers are using, then analyze the sentiment automatically. This makes it easy to identify trends, flag issues, and keep up with open-ended feedback.

Configure notifications to alert your team when you receive a low CSAT so you can close the loop faster.

Plenty of customer satisfaction KPIs measure different aspects of the customer journey. There are also a multitude of uniting best practices to keep in mind. Keep the following in mind.

Which customer satisfaction KPIs should you track? Retention rate? Average resolution time? Customer service satisfaction?

How about multiple customer satisfaction KPIs?

No one metric is “better.” First response time and customer lifetime value both measure customer satisfaction. However, they measure different touchpoints in the customer journey that can impact the customer experience.

So you should track multiple metrics, now what? Review your company objectives and align your metrics to them.

The best currency you have with customers is to prove their voice matters. We all get a ton of surveys, and it’s pretty common not to answer because we don’t think the company cares about our opinion.

There are a few ways to show that’s not the case, but the best solution is to make changes based on your feedback. Once customers realize their voices are being heard, they’ll be more likely to share.

Customer satisfaction levels vary widely by industry. It probably won’t surprise most people to learn that internet service providers have low average rates, while people are highly satisfied with soft drink companies (they’re delicious!).

However, you shouldn’t use external or industry benchmarks as a reason to excuse your scores if they’re low. You’re competing mostly against yourself to satisfy and delight your customers as much as you possibly can. Satisfied customers are less price-sensitive than their less-loyal counterparts.

But these benchmarks can provide context for your scores so you can see if they’re in line with your competitors or out of the norm and what action that means you need to take. 

Related reading: SurveyMonkey Benchmarks

Your customers are taking time out of their busy lives to provide you with thoughtful feedback that can significantly improve your business. If you’re not acting on that feedback, it’s wasting both your time and theirs.

Some feedback is easier to act on than others, but it’s important that your customers feel you’re actually listening to what they’re saying. Making real changes based on the feedback you get when it’s compelling enough to warrant a shift will help increase customer satisfaction, and your business will thrive as a result. 

Measuring customer satisfaction also helps your business track its long-term progress.

You can see how changes you make to the customer experience or with your product line impact customer satisfaction, so you know what’s working well and what’s falling flat. 

Your customers don’t need to be just passive recipients of your customer experience. You should engage them as active participants in the customer experience improvement process. You can do this in a number of ways.

Don’t stop at implementing customer feedback. You can close the feedback loop and create an ongoing conversation with customers. Ultimately, you’ll end up with a Voice of Customer (VoC) program.

A VoC program systematically collects, analyzes, and monitors customer interactions with your brand. It is an ongoing commitment to improving customer satisfaction.

Analyzing and reporting on customer satisfaction metrics is crucial for businesses to understand their customers’ needs and expectations. By analyzing customer satisfaction data, businesses can identify areas for improvement and opportunities to exceed customer expectations. Reporting on customer satisfaction metrics helps businesses to track progress over time and make data-driven decisions. This continuous process of measuring, analyzing, and reporting ensures that businesses stay aligned with their customers’ evolving needs and maintain high levels of customer satisfaction.

Here are some best practices for analyzing customer satisfaction metrics:

By following these best practices, businesses can effectively measure customer satisfaction, gain valuable insights, and implement strategies to improve the overall customer experience.

There are various tools that businesses can use to measure customer satisfaction. These include:

Using these tools, businesses can effectively measure customer satisfaction, gather valuable customer feedback, and implement strategies to improve the overall customer experience.

The more data you have on your customers, the better equipped your business is to serve them. These customer satisfaction metrics will help you understand how your customers feel about your products, services, and experiences. 

By measuring satisfaction KPIs and closely monitoring each metric over time, you can trace the impact of your customer experience management strategies. With satisfied customers comes higher profits, increased loyalty, and a better bottom line for your business.

Learn more about improving customer satisfaction with the SurveyMonkey ultimate guide to Customer Satisfaction Score. Alternatively, take a look at the CSAT use cases to learn more about how SurveyMonkey can help your organization.

NPS®, Net Promoter® & Net Promoter® Score are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld.