CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score)
CSAT is the score customers give after an interaction, usually a 1-5 scale rating overall satisfaction with the support experience.
CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) is the score customers give after a support interaction. The standard implementation is a 1-5 (or 1-7) scale asking how satisfied the customer was with the resolution. CSAT is the only outcome metric the customer fills out directly.
The standard implementation asks customers to rate their satisfaction, often on a 1 to 5 scale, and reports the share of positive responses. Because CSAT is collected right after an interaction, it reflects that specific experience rather than overall loyalty, which is what metrics like Net Promoter Score aim to capture. Response rates and survey timing influence results, so trends over time are more reliable than any single score.
In context
CSAT is the metric the business actually pays for. Deflection rate and AHT are operational levers; CSAT is the customer's verdict. A high deflection rate with a low CSAT means the system is closing tickets without satisfying customers, a leading indicator of churn.
Zendesk's published 2026 CX Trends data: AI-handled tickets land at 4.10/5 CSAT vs human-agent 4.30/5, a 0.2-point gap that compounds across millions of interactions. With hybrid escalation (human-in-the-loop on low-confidence cases), the gap narrows to 0.05 points.
Auralis cohort: +26% CSAT lift, blended across channels. The improvement comes from the combination of speed (FRT lift) and accuracy (Audit-instrumented quality), not from deflection rate alone.
How Auralis uses CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score)
Auralis contracts on a +26% CSAT lift blended across channels. The Audit module instruments quality and recoverability, feeding the weekly tuning loop so CSAT keeps compounding rather than plateauing.