NPS® vs CSAT vs CES
What it is, when to use it, and how to calculate it
Customers are the epicenter of every business, so it is unsurprising that businesses are trying to understand what the customers think about them.
It’s also important for businesses to assess customer feedback and experience, gauge whether customer delight is translating to more customer referrals, and know whether existing customers are continuing to do business with them.
As a means to this end, businesses use a variety of tools to access customer feedback and loyalty from time to time e.g. NPS® (net promoter score), CSAT (customer satisfaction score), CES (customer effort score), among many others. These tools are industry standards that can help businesses understand what customers think and how they fare compared to their competitors. One thing to keep in mind is that these scores may not be able to paint a 100% accurate picture, but, they can serve useful in creating a base and tracking progress over time.
Also known as NPS®, the net promoter score asks customers how likely they are to refer your product or service to their circles. Typically delivered as a single question, customers are asked to rank the likelihood on a 10 scale rating.
Based on the responses received, customers are segregated into three groups:
A CSAT or customer satisfaction score asks customers how satisfied they are with your product or service or about their recent interaction with your business.
Customers are asked to rank their satisfaction predominantly on a scale of 1-5, though we see practices of asking from 2, 3, 7 scale rating as well. Based on their response, you could follow up with a series of closed-ended and open-ended questions.
CES is also a measure of satisfaction, however, it differs from CSAT. It’s used to measure customer satisfaction in relation to the effort required to perform a specific action.
For example, a food delivery service may ask its customers how difficult or easy they found the process of having food delivered. The questions could also go over specific aspects of the delivery process such as order tracking, the payment process, adding a delivery address, etc.
Like NPS®, customers are asked one question. They are asked to rate the task they completed by difficulty. Customers who rate the task as ‘low-effort’ or ‘very easy’ are considered to be satisfied.
Depending on who you ask, they might recommend a five-point, 10-point, or a seven- or five-point CES scale (measuring effort from very easy to very hard). The important point here is to stay consistent and pick one scale and stick to it.
Unlike CSAT and CES, the Net Promoter Score is a measure of overall satisfaction. Since NPS® scores help measure customer sentiment in relation to the business, it’s best to ensure that recent interactions with the customer do not color their opinions
It’s best to ask one question every three or six months. This sort of timeframe can help you establish a baseline and track the progress.
While NPS®, which looks at customer perceptions at a macro level, CSAT scores help businesses understand customer satisfaction at a transaction level, typically in the context of a task or a milestone. As a result, CSAT questions yield the best results when asked when the milestone has been completed, eg., after billing, after a customer support call, after onboarding, etc.
Like NPS®, CSAT questions are also best when asked regularly in order to measure your progress. Unlike NPS®, CSAT is meant to be influenced by recent interactions. You can choose to reach out to the customer with a CSAT question at every tocuh-point or once in a month, depending on what makes more sense to your business.
CSAT is also a key indicator of business growth, and businesses that rank high on customer experience grow faster than their competitors that don’t fare as well, and an improvement in customer experience can also result in an increase in revenue.
With CES, you’re measuring how hard or easy your customer found a particular task, which is why much like CSAT, it’s best to ask CES questions as a follow-up to the interaction.
CES differs from NPS® and CSAT in the sense that the questions pertain to how difficult or easy customers found a particular task or process. Customer effort is also the strongest driver of customer loyalty.
Once calculated, your NPS® can range between -100 and 100. To calculate it, we start by taking the number of promoters and subtracting the number of detractors from it. We then present this number as a percentage against the total respondents i.e., divide by the number of respondents and multiply by 100.
For instance, out of two hundred respondents, 20 were detractors and 40 were promoters, your NPS® would be ((40-20)/200)x100 = 10.
What Net Promoter Scores mean
Unlike the NPS®, CSAT scores are presented as percentages. However you might pick one of the two methods that’s prevalent in the industry today viz. average percentage score and average score.
It takes the number of customers who’ve awarded scores of 4 or 5 (on a 5-point scale), and presents it as a percentage against the total number of respondents. In other words, you are going to group the scores by postive, neutral and negatives, divide each by the total number of responses and multiply by 100.
Five-point CSAT score with 400 responses
Average Score = Sum of all numbers/number of responses
What the scores mean
CES can be calculated in a couple of ways.
If you’re trying to measure the effort required to perform a task, it could help to understand the average score and use that to gauge the ease of use. This can be done by totaling up the individual scores and dividing by the number of responses.
For instance, if 5 customers rated a particular task 1,4,4,3,3; the CES could be:
(1+4+4+3+3)/5/ = 3, meaning that the task neither requires too much effort nor is it easy to perform.
To gain insights on the distribution of customer effort scores, you could also understand the percentage of customers who found the task low or high effort. To illustrate:
Seven-point CES score with 500 responses
Average Score = [(Difficulty rating of 1 * number of responses) + (Difficulty rating of 2 * number of responses)+...] / total number of responses
What the scores mean
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