Understanding the Limitations of CSAT and FRT in Customer Support

Discover why CSAT and FRT metrics may not fully represent customer satisfaction and how to better interpret these indicators for B2B SaaS businesses.

Understanding the Limitations of CSAT and FRT in Customer Support
Created time
Sep 6, 2024 10:19 PM
Author
Image
MikeFounderNotes.png
Publish date
Sep 6, 2024
Slug
understanding-the-limitations-of-csat-and-frt-in-customer-support
Featured
Featured
Type
Article
Ready to Publish
Ready to Publish

Support metrics are useful indicators, but they can also be over-fetishized

Take the often-used CSAT and FRT as examples:
 
CSAT:In Klaus' most recent Customer Service Quality Benchmark Report, they found that the average CSAT response rate was:
 
  • 19% for chat
  • 5% for email or phone
 
That means over 80% of users do not provide feedback. How many people would advise making decisions based on what the 20 of the 80:20 of users want? Even fewer had any context to justify the rating (a grand total of 5% of interactions had a CSAT rating AND a comment). So really, you find yourself having to 'read between the emojis' to work out what someone actually thought. Even then you may be wrong - what if the answer was helpful but the user just didn't like it! (not a joke). Yet websites will proudly present their CSAT score on their site, despite it rarely representing the customer base at large. Not only that, but these scores can be easily 'gamed' by asking after positive interactions but not negative, for instance.
 
FRTis a slightly different case: Companies push to reduce their First Response Times to minutes or sub-minutes, but really, unless your response time is single-digit seconds, the user has probably bounced already or got distracted. You'd probably be better off taking the time to respond more fully, later, if you can't respond instantly.
 
We all want data to help us make decisions but be careful not to put too much weight on it when making decisions.
 
notion image
 

Start using AI customer support in your business today

Create free AI agent

Written by

Mike Heap
Mike Heap

Mike is an experienced Product Manager who focuses on all the “non-development” areas of My AskAI, from finance and customer success to product design, copywriting, testing and more.