Customer satisfaction index

CSAT, or customer satisfaction score, is a post-contact rating averaged across responses and usually collected with a single question immediately after an interaction closes. Because only a small fraction of customers respond, CSAT reflects the experience of people motivated to answer rather than the whole contact population.

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.

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.

A sentiment score is a numeric value representing the emotional polarity of a piece of text or speech. It’s typically scaled from -1 (negative) to +1 (positive), with 0 as neutral, or normalized to a 0-100 index for reporting. Aggregate sentiment gets calculated by classifying a batch of conversations, then averaging or netting the results (percent positive minus percent negative). Sentiment differs from CSAT: sentiment is inferred from language, while CSAT is a rating the customer directly reports. Accuracy drops with sarcasm, mixed-polarity messages, and multilingual or code-switched text. OnClarity’s Voice of Customer pairs sentiment scoring with topic classification to ground each score in context, surfacing the patterns and root causes behind a customer satisfaction index.