You might be wondering what makes a good customer satisfaction score in your industry. If only there were a way out to compare your performance with your competitors. That is when the underlying concept of benchmarking has made lives easier. By comparing your survey scores with the scores of your competitors, you tend to add more context to your scores. Let’s face it – without the scores, how would you even know, how good, bad or ugly are you performing in comparison to your competitors. And that is why, today this blog will walk you through CSAT, NPS, CES – the three customer satisfaction score industry benchmarks. With this, you will be able to compare the three metrics and set your own goal setting. Without any further ado, let us get to it.

Table of Contents:

1. CSAT Benchmarks
2. NPS Benchmarks
3. CES Benchmarks

CSAT Benchmarks

CSAT stands for customer satisfaction. It is measured on a scale from 1-10 or even as a percentage. Performing customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys is one of the most direct and simplest ways to obtain the customer feedback you need, to understand how your customers feel about your brand and your products or services. For a while now, CSAT has been considered an industry standard for comparing customer happiness or satisfaction. It is denoted by the formula:

CSAT (%) = Total Response Scores Given / Total Possible Response Scores X 100

A CSAT score of 80% is usually tagged as a gold standard for excellent performance, however, it does vary from industry to industry. A good CSAT response rate is anything around 25%, and 50% or higher should be considered an excellent CSAT survey response rate. It is said that the average CSAT score across all industries should be at least 15%. It all depends on the type, nature and age of your company that decides what score is good to be considered. Comparing your company’s CSAT against your competition, or the industry as a whole is where they’re often most useful. Let’s check out these CSAT benchmarks across several industries.

NPS Benchmarks

NPS stands for Net Promoter Score. Let’s say, you have given out a survey to your customers and asked a common question to all – how likely are you to recommend our brand to others. On a scale of 1 to 10, the ones who vote a 9 or a 10 for you are your promoters, that means they are satisfied with your services and won’t take a backseat from promoting your brand. The ones who score you anywhere from 0 to 6 are called detractors. They are the ones who are totally dissatisfied with your services and are not likely to recommend your brand to others. On similar tracks, the ones who score you somewhere between 7 or 8 are passive responses who are kind of satisfied with your service but not fully to be tagged as a promoter. It is denoted by the following formula:

NPS = % of Promoters – % of Detractors

The industry standard for NPS benchmark is a score anywhere between 30 to 70. An excellent NPS score is anything over 70. The average industry standard NPS is 17. Having said that, the benchmark hovers on a range from one industry to another. Here, let’s take a look at 2021 NPS Benchmarks for B2B per industry:

CES Benchmarks

CES stands for customer effort score. It is a metric that measures how much effort a customer needs to exert to get his or her concern resolved. It can be in form of an answered question, resolution of a technical glitch and so on. It is easy to deploy and a good measure to take note of the customer loyalty and satisfaction. It is denoted by the following formula:

CES = Sum of all customer effort scores / Total number of respondents

Generally, the customers rate their effort experience on a scale of 1 to 7. Where 1 stands for too much efforts from the customer’s end and a negative response, and 7 stands for least customer effort with a positive response. Whereas, a score between 5 to 7 denotes passive responses. The average customer effort score is 5 out of 7. The average response rate for Customer Effort Score surveys is 29.2%. Anything between 15 – 25% is a good response rate and gives you plenty of data to dig into. Let us now look at the current CES benchmarks as per the industry standards.

Parting Thoughts

It is always too enticing to look into the scores and performance of your competitions. Though a sneak peek every once in a while should be fine, that should not be your sole concern. Start to study these scores and research more on what is going wrong or right. Are your customers not happy with your services? Are they starting to leave? Are the scores alarming and getting on some red flags? What is it that you are going wrong again and again? Instead of getting wrapped up in benchmarking your customer’s satisfaction score, begin to zero in on how you are analyzing and responding to your own data. That is where from the highest pay-off will emerge out of. Remember at the end of the day, it is the happiness and the satisfaction of the customer that should matter to you and not really the scores.

WRITTEN BYRohan Sheth

Rohan has over 11 years of experience in client services, marketing and hospitality field. Previously, he was head of digital marketing for a hi-tech mobile application. Rohan is driven by new challenges and the possibility of making an impact on individuals and businesses.

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