Net Promoter Score (NPS)
What Is a Net Promoter System?
NPS stands for Net Promoter Score. An easy way to define NPS can be defined as a growth indicator. NPS surveys are short and easy and can be very helpful to know what your customers think of your business.
By using NPS, you’ll be able to identify benchmarks set by your competitors using the standard relationship NPS study, and work towards making your business stronger and setting your own benchmarks.
How Does NPS Work

NPS surveys feature one question that asks consumers how likely they are to recommend your products, services, or brand to other people.
Respondents normally answer using a 0-10 scale, with 10 being “Very Likely” and 1 being “Very Unlikely.” This can be also done within the range of -100 and 100.
Anything under 0 is usually a bad sign, a score between 0 and 30 is normally a good score, a score between 30 and 70 is a great score, and anything over 70 means you have very high loyalty levels.
Suggested Reading: Net Promoter Score (NPS) in Customer Success and its relevancy
When to send NPS surveys
If you’re sending NPS to your new customers, make sure you send it to them after they’ve had time to fully experience your product or service. From then on, send your survey out on a regular cadence (quarterly or bi-annually) to monitor evolving customer sentiment.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
What Is CSAT?
CSAT surveys are intuitive for everyone in the company to understand. They are Simple to adopt for both relationship and transactional studies.
CSAT helps you effectively track how your customer feels through the entire customer lifecycle. This is because the question format is so flexible.
How Does It Work?

CSAT asks the question: On a scale from 1 to 5 or 1 to 10, how satisfied were you with [company/interaction].
You can funnel out what you want to ask your customers and how you want them to rate. You can also adjust the timing of your survey (i.e. surveys triggered twice a year as opposed to surveys triggered post-transaction) you can use your CSAT survey for either a relationship or transactional study.
Respondents can usually rate their satisfaction with answers in the “Very Satisfied – Very Unsatisfied” range. Alternatively, you can also let respondents rate their answers in the 1-5 or 1-10 range.
These customer answers can be future used to make certain changes in your business and you can use where it’s relevant. Customer feedback can be further used as testimonials too.
When to send CSAT surveys
CSAT surveys should be timed according to the phase your customer is in. For sales, onboarding, or support interactions, ask for CSAT feedback immediately.
For product feedback, time the survey so that you’ve given the customer enough time to fully experience your product.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
What Is CES?
CES stands for Customer Effort Score. A good CES is a metric that helps you to measure customer satisfaction levels by focusing on the efforts customers make to interact with your business’ services and products.
Like NPS, Customer Effort Score was first introduced to the world in the weighty Harvard Business Review.
CES surveys generally use a single question to ask clients how easy or difficult it is to perform a certain action – whether it is getting help from the support team, buying a product, or leaving a review
How Does It Work?

The Customer Effort Score question asks customers their agreement with the statement: “The company made it easy to handle my issue,” using a seven-point scale from 1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree.
The score is calculated in different ways. A popular approach is to divide the sum of all individual customer effort scores by the number of customers who provided a response. Such as: (Total sum of responses)/(Number of responses) = CES score.
When to send CES surveys
Similar to CSAT, you should ask customers to evaluate an interaction immediately after it happens. This again depends on which phase your customer is in. This could be just after purchase, or after the resolution of a service ticket.
How does CustomerSuccessBox help you
Why ask when you can measure. NPS, CSAT, CES surveys are not leading indicators. A customer success software like CustomerSuccessBox helps you track useful insights about all your customers and also lets you measure their satisfaction and success.
Regular surveys with your customers can help you improve. But these metrics alone cannot be the leading indicator that is going to warn you of the churn that can potentially happen.