Many terms in business are nebulous and rarely are they clearly defined. Customer satisfaction is one of those terms.

The actual definition of customer satisfaction is quite broad: It’s a measurement we use to quantify the degree to which a customer is satisfied with a product, service, or experience.

In practice, this could be executed using many different survey design tactics, such as differing questions, survey response scales, and collection methods. Sometimes, we collect these measures right after a transaction, or sometimes at a fixed date in the customer relationship. Sometimes we use a five-point Likert scale, and sometimes we use a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey.

The point of all this is to measure how a customer feels about a brand interaction.

In fact, there’s some ruckus around the term “customer satisfaction.” After all, as the argument goes, customer satisfaction is simply the absence of customer frustration. If you have a great meal at a restaurant, you don’t sit back, smile, and say, “that meal was ... satisfactory.” 

The argument is that we should aim for delight.

In this guide, we’ll ignore arguments of semantics, but it’s important to note that the focus generally shouldn’t be on providing an average experience, but rather, on creating raving promoters for your business.

Still, measuring customer satisfaction can help us do this (no matter what we call the metric).