CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score)
A transactional survey metric: satisfaction with a specific recent experience, usually "How satisfied were you with X?" on a 1-5 scale, reported as the percentage of positive responses.
CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) asks a customer to rate satisfaction with a specific, recent experience — a support ticket, an onboarding session, a training — typically on a 1-to-5 scale. The score is usually reported as the percentage of respondents choosing the top ratings. Because it is anchored to one interaction, CSAT is a transactional metric: it tells you how that touchpoint performed, not how the customer feels about the relationship overall.
That anchoring is exactly what distinguishes CSAT from NPS, which measures relationship-level loyalty. The two answer different questions and are best used together: NPS on a relational cadence to read the account, CSAT immediately after key interactions to read the process. The operational discipline that makes either useful is the same — route every negative response to an owner as follow-up work, because an unanswered bad score is worse than never having asked.