The battle between Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score® (NPS) has been in full swing since NPS® was introduced in 2003.

The former is designed to measure how satisfied customers are with various aspects of their experience with a product or service, while NPS® measures how likely an individual would be to suggest a product or service to a friend.

Proponents of NPS® claim that it’s a more accurate indicator of customer loyalty and long term growth, while its detractors argue that its single question format is not ideal, nor is it a good indictor of whether someone would actually recommend something.

Of course, there’s no rule that says you have to take sides in this debate. Let’s take a closer look at CSAT and NPS® and in which situations their strengths really shine.

Example CSAT Questions

CSAT surveys are helpful because they can be used to measure specific components of the customer experience.

The questions themselves represent a snap-shot image of a single customer’s experience, meaning that when they’re administered as one-off surveys, they measure only short-term satisfaction.

By asking the same customer similar questions throughout their tenure with your product, however, you can get a look at changing satisfaction levels over time.

This data can be highly actionable, but it can also be biased. In a very insightful article, Zendesk argues:

While viewing customer satisfaction this way is useful, there’s still one problem. Even though you’re looking at satisfaction over time, you’re missing a piece of the puzzle because this view gives extra weight to your most vocal customers…and to your most active customers, who keep coming back and are likely to be fairly happy.

To counteract this potential bias, add NPS into the mix.

The NPS® Question

NPS® surveys consist of a single question: How likely are you to recommend SOMETHING to a friend or colleague?

As you can see, answers are arranged on an 11-point continuum that ranges from, “Very Likely” all the way to, “Not at all likely.”

Those people who answer on the “Not likely” end of the spectrum from 0 to 6 are marked as “Detractors.” Those whose answers fall in the 7 or 8 spots are called “Passives,” and those who answer on the “Very Likely” end (9 or 10) are called “Promoters.”

To get from these numbers to the actual NPS® score you simply take your total percentage of Promoters and subtract the percentage of Detractors. You can leave it as a percentage (43%) or change it to a whole number (43), depending on what seems to make the most sense for you.

For more actionable data, we suggest following up this scale question with an open text field that allows respondents to give you qualitative feedback.

Open text analysis can be time consuming, but you’re going to learn far more about the reasoning behind your NPS® score. Whether positive or negative, there is always something to learn from asking for additional input.

Choosing Between CSAT and NPS®

If you have the ability to measure both satisfaction and likelihood to promote, using both metrics is certainly preferable.

But if you need to choose one, base your decision both on the larger goals for your product and the type of action you’re prepared to take to influence these scores.

Do you already know of a few areas that could use some improvement? Then you may want to track CSAT scores around those features while you make changes.

Are you seeing a decline in new or returning customers? NPS® may be able to help you understand why people aren’t sharing your product or service with their friends.

Keep in mind that CSAT tends to work best in the short term, while NPS® is more of a long term play.

The latter requires you to have an NPS® score to measure your progress against, so you need to get a baseline and then measure consistently over time to see any fluctuations.

Just as CSAT and NPS® can give insight into different parts of the customer’s life cycle, combining SUS and NPS® can do a lot to fill in gaps in your data.

Jeff Sauro (and many others) have found a very strong positive correlation between Net Promoter Score and SUS results (.61 to be exact). This means that SUS scores can explain about 36% of the variability in NPS results.

For those of you keeping track at home, that means you’ll need a SUS score of at least 88 to earn a promoter.

This interrelationship is just one example of how these customer satisfaction metrics work together.

As with any survey question, you need to understand the outcomes you’re hoping for, then choose the metric (or metrics) that will get you the most actionable data with stretching your internal resources too thin or fatiguing your customer bases through over surveying.