Transactional CSAT Basics

Not long ago, we discussed two types of customer satisfaction surveys: overall satisfaction (where the customer is ideally being surveyed on the entirety of their experiences with the company and its products) and transactional surveys (where the customer is surveyed on a specific, usually most recent experience). Transactional surveys have become especially common these days. Online businesses send them to a customer immediately after a transaction.

Department stores direct users to surveys on the bottom of their receipts. Restaurants ask the customer to fill out a survey after their meal, etc. These surveys have, in many ways, become easily adapted into today’s business culture.

While overall satisfaction is important, transactional surveys are more likely to bring information that may be lost in an overall satisfaction survey. For example: Transactional surveys should, in theory, be more likely to spot a specific problem that occurred to an otherwise satisfied customer – something that may have been missed in an overall survey. Transactional surveys should, in theory, be more likely to uncover employees that have provided outstanding or terrible customer service – enough that the customer is willing to point out the benefits of flaws of working with that particular employee.

Transactional surveys should, in theory, be more likely to help companies make more immediate business decisions, such as discovering when a product or service is falling far short of its goals, or find a way to help salvage a relationship with a customer that had a negative experience. Transaction surveys provide a lot of different types of data. All of this is “in theory” because there is no way to guarantee that the accounts you are getting about a specific event accurately measure what you hope they measure – especially if you choose the wrong questions – but at the very least these surveys are able to help your company start uncovering some of the customer experience so that you can use that information to inform your business decisions.

Transactional surveys are extremely valuable to businesses hoping to gauge the customer experience, because they tell the company details about the specific transaction and all of the possible experiences leading up to that sale. That does not mean they are perfect measurements, however. There are often issues that may come up depending on how you do your testing, and especially in how you decide to make decisions based on the results. We’ll explore these in an upcoming article.