CSAT vs NPS: What's the Difference?

Headline options:

1. CSAT vs NPS: What's the Difference?
2. CSAT vs NPS: Which Metric Actually Tells You What Customers Think?
3. CSAT vs NPS: A Product Leader's Guide to Choosing the Right Metric

Both CSAT and NPS claim to measure how customers feel about your product. But they answer fundamentally different questions — and using the wrong one at the wrong time can leave you optimizing for the wrong outcomes. Here's what Product and CX leaders need to know.

What Is CSAT?

CSAT, or Customer Satisfaction Score, measures how satisfied a customer is with a specific interaction, transaction, or experience. It's typically captured through a short survey asking something like "How satisfied were you with your experience today?" on a scale of 1–5 or 1–7.

The score is calculated as the percentage of respondents who select the top ratings (usually 4 or 5 on a 5-point scale). A CSAT of 85% means 85 out of 100 respondents rated their experience positively.

When to use CSAT: After a support ticket is resolved, following onboarding, post-purchase, or any moment where you want to evaluate a discrete touchpoint.

What Is NPS?

Net Promoter Score measures long-term customer loyalty by asking a single question: "How likely are you to recommend [product/company] to a friend or colleague?" Respondents answer on a 0–10 scale and are grouped into three categories:

• Promoters (9–10): Loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying and refer others.
• Passives (7–8): Satisfied but unenthusiastic — vulnerable to competitors.
• Detractors (0–6): Unhappy customers who can damage your brand through negative word of mouth.

NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters, yielding a score between -100 and +100.

When to use NPS: At regular intervals (quarterly, biannually) or at relationship milestones to gauge overall brand perception and loyalty trends over time.

The Core Differences

What they measure

CSAT captures satisfaction with a moment. NPS captures loyalty to a brand. A customer can rate a support interaction 5/5 (high CSAT) while still being unlikely to recommend your product (low NPS) — because satisfaction with one touchpoint doesn't guarantee overall loyalty.

Time horizon

CSAT is transactional and immediate. It tells you whether a specific experience met expectations right now. NPS is relational and forward-looking. It reflects accumulated experiences and predicts future behavior like renewals, expansion, and referrals.

Actionability

CSAT scores tend to be directly actionable. A dip after onboarding points you to the onboarding flow. A drop post-support tells you something broke in the resolution process. NPS, by contrast, signals broader sentiment but requires further investigation to understand the "why" behind the score.

Benchmarking

NPS is more commonly used for competitive benchmarking because its methodology is standardized across industries. CSAT scales and question formats vary between organizations, making cross-company comparisons less reliable.

When to Use Which

The answer isn't one or the other — it's both, deployed strategically.

Use CSAT when you need to evaluate and improve specific touchpoints in the customer journey. It excels at pinpointing friction in processes like onboarding, support, or feature adoption.

Use NPS when you need to understand the overall health of your customer relationship and track loyalty trends over time. It's your leading indicator for churn risk and organic growth potential.

The most effective CX programs layer both metrics across the customer lifecycle: CSAT to optimize individual experiences, and NPS to monitor the cumulative impact of those experiences on loyalty.

The Bigger Challenge: Making Sense of It All

Where most teams struggle isn't in collecting CSAT and NPS data — it's in understanding the story behind the scores. A declining NPS tells you something is wrong, but not what. A high CSAT on support tickets might mask the fact that customers are contacting support too often in the first place.

The real value emerges when you connect these quantitative signals to the qualitative feedback customers are already giving you — in surveys, support conversations, reviews, and sales calls. That's where patterns surface, root causes become clear, and you can prioritize the changes that will actually move both scores.

Enterpret unifies customer feedback from every channel and automatically surfaces the themes, sentiment shifts, and emerging issues behind your CSAT and NPS trends. Instead of manually reading thousands of responses, Product and CX leaders get an adaptive feedback taxonomy that evolves with your product — so you always know not just what customers scored you, but why.

See how Enterpret turns CSAT and NPS feedback into actionable insights →

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