How to Collect and Act on CSAT Scores After Implementation and Support

Net Promoter Score tells you how customers feel about your company. It arrives twice a year and says nothing about the project that went badly in March or the ticket that sat for a week. A customer satisfaction score is the other half. You ask right after something happens, while the customer still remembers it, and you get an answer about that thing.

There are two moments worth asking about in a B2B software company: the end of an implementation, and the close of a support ticket. Both are places where a customer decides, quietly, whether you are the kind of company that keeps its promises. Most founders learn the answer from a cancellation notice. A short survey at each moment tells you months earlier, and it tells you which team and which project it was.

The goal: A short survey at the end of every implementation and every support ticket, a score you track by month, and a rule that every low score reaches a named person quickly.

Background

CSAT sits between two plays you may already run. Support Metrics tracks how fast you respond and resolve, and lists customer satisfaction as one of its three measures, without saying how to collect it. Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a one-question, relationship-level survey sent to the whole customer base no more than twice a year. CSAT is transactional: it is tied to a project or a ticket, sent straight after it, and read by the team that did the work.

The template's survey uses a four-point scale: 4 very satisfied, 3 somewhat satisfied, 2 not very satisfied, 1 not at all satisfied. There is no neutral middle, so a respondent has to lean one way. Report two numbers: the average score, and the share of responses that were a 3 or 4.

Steps

1. Name an owner for each survey. The Implementation Lead owns the post-implementation survey, and the CS Lead owns the support survey. One person for each, with a backup, who can answer "who reads this?" without looking it up.
2. Write the post-implementation survey. Start from the template's twelve questions and trim to what you can act on. They cover how satisfied the customer is with the implementation, with your implementation team and with your company's service overall, how useful the new system is to their work, how clear their role was, how involved they felt in decisions, how effective the project and technical meetings were, whether people across their company took part, whether they felt appreciated, how committed the whole team seemed, and whether the system will make their job better. Add one open comment box at the end.
3. Write the support survey. One question: how satisfied are you with the support you received? Same four-point scale, plus an optional comment box. Keep it to that.
4. Word every question neutrally. Ask how satisfied people are, not what went wrong. If you ask a customer what frustrated them, they will find something, whether or not it was on their mind. Put the comment box last and call it "anything else we should know?" The goal is to measure how customers feel, not to hand them a reason to be unhappy.
5. Send each survey at the right moment, automatically.
   • Implementation: within a week of going live, to every person on the customer side who took part in the project, and not only the person who signed the contract. Several of the questions are about roles and meetings that the buyer never sees.
   • Support: when a ticket is closed, from your ticket system. See the Support Ticket System play.
6. Set the response rule before the first response comes in. Any score of 1 or 2 goes to the owner and to the CS Lead the same day. The owner contacts the customer within two business days, as a default to adjust, and records what happened. Decide whether the cause is yours, the customer's or a third party's. Apologize and fix what is yours. Be kind and clear about the rest, and do not take on blame for what you do not own.
7. Record every response in one log: the customer, the project or ticket, the date, the score, the owner, and the action taken. Store the log, the survey text and the process description in one place, so a new hire or a buyer's diligence team can see the process and the history. The template's CSAT tab is built to hold the process; its Implementation Hours tab belongs to the Implementation Hours Tracking play.
8. Review monthly. The CS Lead brings these to the customer success or leadership meeting, for each survey: the average score, the share satisfied, the response rate, the number of low scores, and what changed because of them. Look at the trend over several months, not one month's score. A falling response rate is a finding too.

Troubleshooting

Nobody answers the survey. Send it from a person the customer worked with, make it answerable in under a minute, and keep it to the length above. Check that it reaches the people who used the system and not only the buyer.

Every score is a 4. Read the comments before you celebrate. Check that the survey is going to everyone and not only to your happiest contacts, and that the wording is not nudging people toward the top answer.

A customer is angry about something we do not control. Say so plainly and kindly, and help where you can. Take ownership of what is yours. Taking the blame for the rest teaches customers that you will pay for everyone's mistakes.

We already send NPS. Keep it. NPS shows you the relationship, and CSAT shows you the moments that build or break it. They answer different questions.