NPS vs. CSAT

Our team of customer success always knew where operations should spend their time and their money. I was always the person who would walk into a room or a meeting and say, here, here and here. And this is what you should do because we had so many people giving us feedback on their experience there. That is real data. That is what's important. You want to listen to your research department tell you what was good last week. All right. I much rather listen to customers who are standing in my business or using my product right now.

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Account Experience podcast. I am here as always with my co host, Carrie T. Self. Say hello, Carrie.

Hello everyone.

And today we are having a battle of the titans. So you've heard about the bitcoin versus the burrito battle. We're going full in on CSAT versus nps. Carrie, did you or did you not spend your whole day going and trying to crack that code on the burritos versus the bitcoin thing on Chipotle?

You are just calling me out because that's all we've been talking about for the last couple hours. Burritos. Bitcoin's nice, but burritos? Come on. Yeah, most definitely.

Yeah. For those of you that don't know, Chipotle launched a campaign today, April 1st. Coincidence? I'm not so sure. Basically asking people to input a six number digit onto a page, burritos or bitcoin.com and you have a chance of getting burritos or bitcoin if you get the code right. So everybody's going down this rabbit hole of what could it be? Like, is there any clues on the page? And we just did that for like 20 minutes. So anyways, which got us thinking, could we do a similar head to head battle with CSAT and nps? And I know there's been a lot of, I don't want to say confusion because I think people get it, but there's been a lot of debate about what metric is best for what situation. Spoiler alert. We're big NPS people here, but I'm going to do my best to represent the CSAT side and that might be not the best of ideas because there's not a ton I can defend. But I'll do my best. That's my promise.

So I think what's important here to say, and I think you said it well though, is like we've selected our titan per se, and we're not here to say one doesn't work after the other. It's what you can do. With them, I think is going to be important. I think. And that will be the approach we'll take from this is okay, you're thinking about it or you're on the fence or you have the ability to use one or the other. And we're just going to talk through a little bit of why we think 1, 1 value which 1 has more value in what we do in the relationship building process.

Yeah, exactly. And I think that scenario specific. So I think. Let me just kick it off. Gary. Ready for this battle of the titans? All right. CSAT is better for measuring satisfaction on different channels. So I can send a CSAT survey out, has 50 questions where I ask how everybody is satisfied about your website, about your chat experience, about your xyz. You can go down the list and send one survey and get every piece of feedback about all your channels with one customer. I think that's what CSAT is good for.

So how many questions did you say that was, Ian? Let me just run an inventory here. About 50.

It's probably about 50 when it's all said and done. Yeah, probably 8 or 10 per channel.

But I guess that's always the question I always like to bring up. If you are measuring, let's say a journey or multiple touch points or multiple places where your organization engages with your customer in a CSAT scenario, like you said, you have to have every channel tuned in. Now you're making the person filling out this survey this touch point multiple times and then you're also asking them to give you a level of satisfaction between 0 and 5 or 1 and 5. It's a sliding scale. Like how do I measure that? Do I measure it on time spent or whatever? So first there's the mathematical equation that people gets baked into this. The time and the effort. So let's take it from the other side on that point. Nps Net promoter one question, would you recommend us? And look, we get dinged all the time on this. We always hear people say, isn't it kind of simple? Well, if I was only getting 10 responses out of a thousand, I would say maybe we might be able to have some blind spots. But in relationship building, people are very motivated to answer one simple question. So we usually see higher response rates with nps. And in that what we're able to do is ask the one question and then attach drivers to the backside of that. So I can take and maybe not 50. Ian and I might be exaggerating just a little bit, but we can take 20 or 30 touch points and connect that to that Question in the form of drivers. These additional reasons why they selected that score. And we can start to populate these buckets with a sentiment score from 0 to 10. That helps us to start to weight what is important to people that are giving us. A promoter, a Passover detractor. Would you say, what, 10 minutes to complete a CSAT versus a minute or so to complete an NPS survey?

Yeah. I resign my position.

Thank you for attending this week's podcast.

No, but I think it's really interesting where you can kind of. The csat, technically my position was accurate. I can get a bunch of information about every channel. So, like, if I, if I launched a new website, I could ask about the experience of the website, which is true. But I think the way I look at it, Carrie, is like you're operating a Model T in the era of a Tesla, right? And this is going to sound maybe a bit too aggressive, but just roll with me, guys. You can do the same thing with nps, and it's a lot shorter and a lot more effective if you tie your NPS data to your question, 0 to 10 to drivers, and you have your channels built into your driver. So, like the way drivers work. And I know we talk about drivers all the time, but you have a top level driver, it's like a little checkbox. And it could say product. And once they check that, it expands out into sub drivers which are like, ease of use in the product, menu structure in the product, you know, usability reporting, all of these things. And you can do this for every channel. So you can have, you know, I think our rule of thumb is about five drivers, main level drivers for each. But you can get up to like 8 to 10 if you really need to. And these can be the channels. They can basically be the same channels you're asking in the csat, but. But your customer can. Instead of feeling, I'm so well satisfied with your experience on your website, I'm somewhat satisfied with the chat experience on the website. I'm somewhat. You know what I mean? You can just check, check, check, check, and you can leave an open comment box if you need to, but this can all happen within two minutes. Like you said. I think we got a, literally a B2B benchmark stat the other day from our product anonymized across all of our different customers that it takes roughly, I think, like, what, two minutes to finish the survey? Carrie? 90 seconds.

Almost any of our customers that had a survey that was under two minutes. Yeah, yeah, saw. I think it was a seven point well, there's many things that happened. Our response rate definitely went up, was more likely to get that and the score went up because more people were contributing. I mean just there was this cascade of getting more feedback for sure.

And I think just to wrap up a bow around that last kind of comment is like you're getting the same information at about a tenth of the time. And not only that, like CSAT isn't really actionable, like it gives you information, but you're not, you're not using a system, you're just, you're researching your insights based. Right. We've talked about this previously too. You are gathering information that helps you not. It's not really helping you improve the experience of the customer immediately. It's, it's. Or fix a problem or xyz. You're gathering information that better informs you, which is okay in some instances, but why not do both? Gather information and act and change your business at the same time. That's what I've never been able to rectify in my head about CSAT versus mps.

That is such an important point that how are you using your survey campaign? How are you. What are you doing with this? Are you treating it as a review? Do you want to show off to other companies, say, hey, I've got a 97.4. Well, I've got a 97.5. It's like, it's not even realistic. What are you doing with that except, you know, showing off? It's, I hate to say, it's like a pissing contest and no one's winning. Everyone's getting hit in the face, if you know what I mean. You know, and it's like an MPS is actionable. You know, it's like, where should we invest our time? Gravity. It allows the person completing the survey to gravitate and select what they think your organization should be focused on. Why they buy you, why they renew, why they stick with you. And I'm with you. I think one is very, you know, it's trailing. Hey, this is how I felt. You know, here's. Yes, I was satisfied. Now what? Nothing. We're going to put it on our website versus hey, yeah, thanks for asking, but if I was going to tell you to work on something, this is what I would say. And I think, I think that's a different one is very much more actionable. The NPS definitely is. I do want to say one thing about CSAT again. I'm not debunking or trashing it, but there are transactional situations where you Might not be getting a lot of them where, like Ian said, you might need to touch a couple of channels. If you roll out a new website, if you have a new support team and you need to collect data, but you're not expecting a lot to flow in immediately, I could see there being some value, but then I would argue the other side, the reason why you're probably not seeing a lot of responses on it. The more time people spend on a survey, the less likely they are to complete it.

All right, well, let me take that argument then. Let's go. Let's go there. Number two, battle number two. CSAT is better for transactional service. I just submitted a support ticket. It was just resolved. You send over a CSAT survey, it's still 15, 20 questions long, but it's a transaction. It's literally saying, how satisfied are you with your experience with John Doe, who provided you service today on your issue? I think CSAT's better for that.

Go again. I'm going to have to stick with what I practice, what I preach, and what I did myself. And we transitioned all of our transactional surveys over to NPS questions. So think of it this way. There's a lot of research that goes behind Net Promoter. There's a lot of data that goes behind it. This was not someone's idea in a basement, and we decided to roll with it. We literally. There's years of research on this. There's a lot of people who say, look, why is this so important? It was the one time in surveying where people could actually tie referral growth, people willing to promote you to others to a survey question and based on how they scored. And basically we went through a 0 to 10 and we asked people to prioritize and we asked people to score us in different areas and we saw a direct correlation. Those that were willing to give us a 9 or a 10 in whatever question we asked, they were willing to promote that experience with someone else. So if I have a brand and a product, yes, that's an experience. We talked about Chipotle there. That is an experience. 9 and 10 from me. I will promote them, scream and yell about them, right? I go to that other guy down the road, it's an experience. Might give him a two or three. They're not throwing Bitcoin at me, you know, So I score them, whatever it is. But we start to arrange these. It's the same thing in your transactional surveys. Let's say support is one of your transactional surveys, and that's what you're Offering up and you want feedback on that. That's an experience. It's a smaller one, but there's still people to people. There's still a process. You still have drivers that make up that experience. Again, I would tell you, ask one question, attach the drivers to it, you're in and out in under a minute. I think your NPS relationship should be a mirror of your transaction surveys. It trains your customers to get used to the way you ask. It's very low lift. It's easy. I understand how it works. It makes sense. So there's something beautifully dynamic and rich about the simplicity of an MPS question and driver.

Yeah. And I think you hit on it pretty well, Kerry. That there's the understanding. Let me just again play devil's advocate here. Is that the understanding or the common understanding in the marketplace right now seems to be that CSAT is better for micro type of interactions or micro experiences. You can measure those with CSAT better than any other metric. But I think what you're saying is you can still use NPS at a transactional level to capture the micro sentiment and tie that into your overall program. Why would you? I mean, honestly, I just. We both have been program managers in the past. I couldn't really imagine wrapping my head around managing both a CSAT survey and an NPS survey. Just align it across the board. Get different dashboards for your micro and your macro level. So brand sentiment versus, you know, transactional sentiment of different channels. And you can literally start reporting on sentiment across channels, across journey points. Right. Like, I mean, align it around one metric. You got to kind of, in my opinion, you should pick a side. And I think that the ship has sailed with csat just like it did with the Model T. Nobody wants to spend 50 minutes filling out a survey. I mean, I remember there's a very well known speaker company that Carrie and I both love to death, but I have actually taken and given up on halfway through a CSAT survey from them. I was really jacked up to take it because I love them. And I was like, this is the best brand. I think they're like just doing some amazing things. And it was literally a 20 minute. I took 10 minutes to take it and then bailed halfway through because it did that whole thing where you finished the first set of CSAT and there was like, you're 15% done. You're like, all right. Then the second page goes, you're 20% done. So they kind of lowered the threshold.

And we're fans and that's. Listen to us Scream and yell here, people. We are super fans and we want to give positive feedback and we want to be critical. I'll let you in on a secret. We also think that X, Y and Z could get a little bit better, and if it did, we'd probably buy more from you. But if you make me spend 15, 20 minutes to fill out a survey that could be done in under a minute, I. Now I'm upset now. It's an annoying touch point. And you're right. I mean, I try to do that for the brands I love, but I give up if it's that complicated, that difficult.

Well, and the other thing, I won't mention the brand by name, but the other thing is, like, I've taken one of those in the past, too, and this is the second one, and they didn't do anything with it. They didn't follow up with me. They didn't let me know what they did with the information. So it's like. So they've kind of trained me to, like, not expect much. And they're asking me to take 20 minutes out of my day to give them feedback, and I'm not getting anything out of it. I don't get a discount. I don't get a coupon. Like, all right, like, I'm not going to do it. I'm sorry, I love you guys, but I'm not going to do it.

So round three. I mean, what can you do with a CSAT compared to what you can do with an nps? You know, is NPS truly a predictive metric? Is it something that you can make strategic decisions on, act on? And I would ask the same question of csat. Can you do that with a CSAT score? Were you satisfied? What can you do with that, Ian?

So I don't know. And I think that's like one of those things where I'm sure there's research out there. I haven't read anything super convincing. I think where I keep coming back to is the research that Bain did with NPS that does actually correlate future profitable growth to NPS gains, Right? And we take a very much hard stance on that is like, yes, it does, if you do the right things, but we almost do a trust but verify type of thing, right? Like, we trust it's going to do growth for this company, but we're also tying real revenue to the. To the metric, so you can actually monitor that growth in real time. That's literally CG, what we're doing right now in B2B, right? CSAT. I know it's good for research. I know you can correlate it to satisfaction. I know you can kind of do a fuzzy match, like brand sentiment. I'm not sure how that ties to growth, though. And that's. That's my honest. And I might get blasted on this. So if you guys have research that says CSAT ties directly to growth like NPS does, please send it our way. I would read it in a heartbeat. I have not seen much out there that does that or says that.

Yeah, I hate to say it feels almost after the fact. And it's a good way to say, oh, that worked. It's kind of like you're lobbying stuff out, and if the score is high enough, like, okay, we'll keep doing that and we'll stop doing that low score thing. And I feel NPS is. It's baked into the process like this. We're telling you to go this direction. We're telling you this is what we want or where you should spend time. So let me put on the customer cap for a second. I. I love celebrating. I was a customer of Customer Gauge, and that's how I fell in love with not only the process and the platform, but the action behind it. And I always tell the story of how our team of customer success always knew where operations should spend their time and their money. I was always the person who would walk into a room or a meeting and say, here, here, and here. And this is what you should do because we had so many people giving us feedback on their experience there. That is real data. That is what's important. You want to listen to your research department tell you what was good last week. All right. I much rather listen to customers who are standing in my business or using my product right now.

Boom. Now, I'll take it one step further, Carrie. So a hundred percent get the feedback in real time. But the other thing that CSAT doesn't really solve is the why. Why did they give you that score? Why. Why do they. Why are they only somewhat satisfied with your product? And I think the benefit of NPS and Stefan, which I'm gonna. I'm gonna tip my hat to this a little bit. He's one of our customers for. From Heineken. And the way he described his program using Customer Gauge is something along the lines of like a customer conversation tool or a customer. It was basically what it was, a customer conversation program. And I think the benefit of NPS is that if you're using nps, you're basing it around action, not research. Right? So CSAT is very much in the research space where you get that data. Like you said, Carrie, it's two weeks, you know, gone already, and you're not doing anything with it. NPS comes in, you know the score. You follow up with the customer immediately. You can have a conversation if you immediately. A lot of the times, that's the really cool thing about nps. Detractor comes in, you reach out, immediately, have that conversation, like, why? You know the why. And you can even capture that in our surveys, too. Like, that's the other thing is you can capture it without csat. I mean, you can't see sat, as far as I'm aware. But that. That's a powerful thing, like understanding the why and being able to have that conversation with the customer. Whereas, like you said, CSAT just sits on the shelf somewhere in an insight lab and get stale.

And I want to bring this back up one more time because you said it. You supercharged the process by tying it to money, to revenue. It's guys, money talks. I hate to say it. If that hurts anyone's feelings, you're on the wrong podcast. We're about growth or about referral. It's, you know, it's what is driving people to spend money with you and when. You can connect that to the scores they're giving you and to the response rates and. And to the drivers. Now we're starting to put dollar amounts on the drivers they're selecting. Yeah, I'm sure you could go back to csat. I'm sure you could bake up some kind of financial thing on that if they were satisfied in how much they spent. But we have a direct correlation to people who score high and people who give us higher scores and how much they spend continues to grow time after time after time. And the reverse is true, too. It's an identifier for who's gonna churn. If they're giving us a detractor and we don't respond, they're gonna churn. They're pissed. They're upset. Promoters giving us a chance to fix it. If we do nothing, they leave. If they're a passive, all they care about is money anyway. Usually like, okay, we're satisfied. That's your satisfaction score right there. Can we make them into promoters or not? But we still have to take care of them. It's such a heavy tool. You really supercharge it when you tie that revenue in it.

I don't want to go too deep here because it's not necessarily discussion, but just to echo What Kerry's saying, when you tie revenue to it and you can tie revenue to the drivers and you can understand, like, a lot of my promoters really are tied to this specific driver. And a lot of our detractors are tied to this other driver. Like, let's say just for the easy use case product. That's a really good sign. And then you can dive into your sub drivers like, oh, okay, like 2 million bucks are tied to this one driver of the menu structure. Okay, maybe we should retool the menu structure. We could probably get some of that money back in the good column. Right, the promoter column. So it's not. We say this a lot and I think we maybe need to just keep repeating it is like when you tie revenue to it, it changes the game. It really does. Because then it gives you a lens. Gives you a lens to look at the feedback through that helps you not only start those conversations with customers, but focus on the right things in your business that will drive growth now and future growth down the road. I think that's. That's a very specific thing that I think gets lost sometimes because we're so used to it, Kerry. We talk about it every day and like how amazing it is and how everybody should be. It's crazy that nobody's not. Everybody's doing this. Right. But when we talk about integrating revenue, that's really what it means. It's like just making better decisions that will impact your revenue situation. Right. I mean, that's, at the end of the day, what it is. What else we got? Any other battles we can go into? CSAT vs. NPS? Which one? Which one has more bubbles?

There's one left, but I don't think there's going to be much of a battle on this one, if you want me to be honest. And I might be playing a little bit with some wording here and you might call me out on it, but this is what I'm going to say. CSAT is a score. It's a question, it's a score. It's a metric. Nps. The S in NPS does not stand for score, it's system. If you are running a net promoter program, you are running a system, a process. And that process includes reaching out, engaging, starting conversation, like Ian said earlier, building on that relationship, feeding that loop again, and continually building on that. So, I mean, I guess that if that were, if there was a mic drop moment in this debate, this battle of titans, as you say, I really believe that if you truly are running a net promoter system, you're running a process and a program that will keep energizing, keep feeding your company, promoting growth, identifying strategic decisions you guys can make as an organization. It also gets cultural buy in. People get it, they're part of the process. It's contagious, almost. Satisfaction score can either be love or hate. Either. Like, oh, that's great. That's not a good NPS system, has people wanting to be part of that. It busts through silos, it busts through departments. And again, I speak from experience of myself. Multiple programs, Ian's done it also, but we've also seen our other customers. This is where the culture takes off. This is where the process hits the ground and really, really takes off and makes a healthy system out. It's not just a score that you look at on a wall. It's a program, a process. It's something that people can do something with.

I think. Spot on, Carrie. I mean, that literally is a mic drop moment right there, I think I don't have a rebuttal for that on the CSAT side, if I'm being honest. But just. Just one one final point. I think, like, score. Even if CSAT and nps, we just looked at it from a score standpoint, I think NPS still wins because, like, you can kind of figure out what the score, where the score came from, right? Whereas csat, it might be all over the place. Like, I've seen CSAT questionnaires that literally tackle every channel, every possible experience I've had with a company. And it's like, yeah, you have a score at the end of that, but God knows you can. I mean, you probably could get to it, but it's messier. And I think board members, I think CEOs. The NPS is so widely adopted across, like the four Fortune 500 to Fortune 1000, that it's just. You're speaking the same language at that point, right? Like, if you go to a CEO and say, well, we have somewhat satisfied people on this specific thing and somewhat dissatisfied over there. NPS is very simple. It's like we're at a 62 and we could approve it if we do these three things. You add revenue into the mix when you're talking to a CEO, even better. But yeah, I just. I really think that CSAT served a purpose maybe back in the 80s or 90s, but I think modern NPS, and I'm not talking about. I hate to say it out loud, but Baines nps, I think was okay. It started it all off, right? Um, and they wrote the book they wrote two books. Three books. Um, but I think what the modern version of NPS is, Account experience. You take that in. Especially for B2B, you take that in, you add revenue, you add account data, you manage multiple different contacts at the account level and get NPS for each one of those across multiple different journey points. I mean, that's. That's where really where the magic happens, I think. Yeah, I mean, CSAT kind of got a beat down here, but.

I love that, though. It's a great point that. Because with all that noise, it's CSAT almost cancels itself out with all those questions and it's all over the place. Instead of asking someone, where do you go with that? We can bucketize our customers pretty fast. We can look at the ones that love us or hate us or are struggling. And you're right, it's very, very precise. It's spot on. And you're right to go through a CSAT survey and to break that down, to know where to start and when to stop can be a bit confusing.

It's messy.

Yeah, it's really good point.

All right, so I think we've officially busted this whole CSAD versus NPS thing. If you guys have opinions on this, let us know. We'd love to hear it. We're always open to new ideas. I think we're basing it off of our experience in the field with some. Some B2B clients out there. But yeah, we'd love to hear from you. Hit us up on LinkedIn. Thank you guys for listening. This has been the Account Experience podcast. Make sure to share with your friends and listen to the next one. This episode of The Account Experience PODC is sponsored by CustomerGage, the leading B2B account experience software that ties revenue to your experience data in real time to help you make better account centric decisions that drive revenue growth. Quick question. What do you guys think is the number one reason B2B experience programs fail? Believe it or not, it's lack of C suite buy. In CustomerGage's research with MIT, they've found the quickest way to align yourselves with the C suite is to actually align with what they care about most, which is revenue. That's why CustomerGage is literally built from the ground up to maximize and track the revenue contribution from your experience program in real time. Companies like dhl, Anheuser Busch, Heineken. Uh, yeah, we get a good amount of free bear1 login, Ironmountain, H&R block, SuperOffice and SugarCRM are already using Customer Gauge to maximize maximize their growth by tying their programs to revenue. And with over $10 billion worth of account revenue actively being managed in Customer Gauge, yeah, that's billion. With a B, they're the leader in the space. But maybe even more interesting, they found that once you get alignment with that C suite, the needs of these B2B practitioners or the program champions are evolving too. In such a complex account environment, it can be really tough to measure and act on feedback question quickly across multiple departments, divisions, or even locations. Luckily, Customer Gauge has you covered there as well, with account native features that easily help you not only measure the feedback for multiple stakeholders in an account, but act on that feedback in real time. Because at the end of the day, if you're not empowering your frontline staff with the right insights to address customer issues, you're going to be dealing with a churn issue. It's not a matter of if, it's really a matter of when. Customer Gauge helps you distribute this experience data across your entire organization, regardless of department, regardless of location, regardless of division, all in real time. No manual spreadsheets or a team of analysts are needed. CustomerGage's mission is to help B2B companies harness the power of account centric growth to drive meaningful change in their businesses. And that's a powerful thing. If you want to see Customer Gauge in action, go ahead and check out CustomerGage.com and get a demo of account experience today. You won't regret it.