CSAT

Net Promoter Score is a likelihood-to-recommend score used as a loyalty benchmark, calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. It produces a single comparable number, but the free-text comment attached to each score carries most of the diagnostic value.

Customer effort score measures how hard customers say it was to get their issue resolved, usually on a seven-point scale asked immediately after contact. Effort predicts loyalty more reliably than satisfaction, because a customer can be satisfied with an outcome yet exhausted by the process of reaching it.

Sentiment analysis scores the emotional tone of a conversation to flag risk and measure experience without waiting for a survey response. Applied across every contact rather than a sampled few, it covers the large majority of customers who never complete a satisfaction survey at all.

A verbatim is a customer’s exact words, kept unedited as evidence in voice-of-customer reporting. Verbatims carry the specificity that aggregate scores strip out, which is why they persuade product and executive audiences when a percentage change on a dashboard cannot do so on its own.