In BPO, CSAT stands for Customer Satisfaction, the score built from the short survey a customer receives after a call, chat, or email. It is usually reported as the percentage of respondents who chose the top ratings, and it sits on almost every agent scorecard beside handle time and quality.
How CSAT works day to day
The survey comes by a follow-up email or text, a pop-up at the end of a chat, or a transfer to a recorded survey after the call. The core question is some version of how satisfied the customer was with the interaction, on a scale of one to five or one to ten; further questions may ask about the agent specifically or about the company. Reporting usually takes the top one or two boxes as satisfied, so a five-point survey reports the share of fours and fives. Every response is attributed to the agent who handled the contact, which turns a company-level measure into a personal one.
Because it is personal, CSAT changes behaviour. Agents learn which endings earn a good score, team leaders coach on the customer's perception of the call rather than just its resolution, and the account watches for survey pushing, where an agent asks the customer for a high rating or steers them away from the survey after a bad call. Most accounts forbid that outright, and some treat it as a quality auto-fail, because it corrupts the number the client is paying to see. The healthier lever is resolution: the strongest driver of a good score is the problem actually going away on the first contact.
CSAT in a Philippine BPO
On a Philippine floor CSAT is typically one of the three or four weighted lines that decide a monthly incentive, and it is the one agents feel they control least, because the customer's mood, the product, and the policy all land on the same survey. The local detail worth knowing is the count. Surveys come back from a small fraction of customers, so an agent's month can rest on a few dozen responses, and tenured agents track how many have come in alongside the percentage. Accounts also calibrate CSAT against quality scores: an agent with high satisfaction and low quality is usually giving customers what they want rather than what the process allows, and that combination draws attention just as quickly as the reverse.
CSAT: quick answers
01What is a good CSAT score?
It depends on the scale, the industry, and how the account counts satisfied responses, so targets are set per account rather than by any universal rule. What matters on the floor is your number against the account's target and against the team average, both of which appear on the same scorecard.
02Is CSAT the same as NPS?
No. CSAT asks about a single interaction and is scored right after it. NPS, the net promoter score, asks whether the customer would recommend the company and is a brand-level measure. Both may appear on an account, but only CSAT is usually tied to an individual agent.
03Can I ask the customer to give me a good score?
On most accounts, no. Asking for a rating, coaching the customer on the survey, or avoiding the survey after a difficult call is called survey pushing, and it is treated as a quality failure because it makes the score meaningless to the client.
Related terms
CSAT sits alongside the vocabulary you will hear in the same breath on the floor: DSAT (dissatisfaction score), KPI (key performance indicator), QA (quality assurance), AHT (average handle time), and SLA (service level agreement). Each entry answers in the first forty words, the same way this one does.
New to the industry or leveling up inside it? The AI Academy teaches the skills accounts now hire for, and the job board lists live BPO roles across the Philippines.