Customer Satisfaction vs NPS: What Is the Difference?
Customer satisfaction (often measured as CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) are two of the most common ways to quantify how customers feel — but they answer different questions. Confusing them leads teams to track the wrong number for the decision they are trying to make.
This guide explains the difference between customer satisfaction and NPS, compares them side by side, and shows when to use each — or both together.
For the broader landscape of measures, see customer satisfaction metrics, and for the full survey design process start with the customer satisfaction survey guide.
Definitions
Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
Customer satisfaction measures how happy a customer is with a specific experience, product or interaction. It is usually captured with a satisfaction rating (commonly 1–5), and CSAT is reported as the percentage of respondents who chose a top rating.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS measures loyalty by asking how likely a customer is to recommend your company on a 0–10 scale. Respondents become promoters (9–10), passives (7–8) or detractors (0–6), and the score is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors.
Side-by-side comparison
| Customer satisfaction (CSAT) | NPS | |
|---|---|---|
| What it measures | Happiness with a specific experience | Loyalty and likelihood to recommend |
| Typical scale | 1–5 satisfaction | 0–10 recommendation |
| Time horizon | The moment / interaction | The overall relationship |
| Best moment to ask | Right after an interaction | Periodically, relationship-level |
| Score format | % choosing top ratings | % promoters − % detractors |
| Best for | Improving specific touchpoints | Tracking loyalty trends over time |
Question examples
The wording makes the difference in intent clear:
CSAT: How satisfied were you with your recent support experience? (Very dissatisfied → Very satisfied)
NPS: How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague? (0 = Not at all likely, 10 = Extremely likely)
Notice that CSAT points at one experience while NPS asks about your company as a whole. Compute either from raw counts with the CSAT calculator or the NPS calculator.
Use cases
- Use CSAT to improve a specific touchpoint — support, onboarding, delivery — where you want fast, actionable feedback on what just happened.
- Use NPS to track loyalty at the relationship level over time and to compare cohorts, segments or periods.
- Use CSAT when you need many data points per experience; use NPS when you want one recurring health metric for the whole customer relationship.
Strengths and limitations
Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
Strengths: easy to understand, tied to a specific moment, and quick to act on. Limitations: it reflects a single interaction rather than the overall relationship, and satisfaction in the moment does not always predict long-term loyalty.
NPS
Strengths: a single comparable loyalty metric that is easy to track over time and widely recognized. Limitations: the 0–10 buckets discard nuance, and without a follow-up 'why' question the score alone does not tell you what to fix.
When to use both
CSAT and NPS are complementary, not competing. Many teams use CSAT after key interactions to catch and fix problems quickly, and NPS on a recurring schedule to watch overall loyalty. Together they show whether individual experiences add up to a loyal customer base.
Whichever you choose, always pair the score with an open-text 'why' question. The number tells you where you stand; the comments tell you what to do about it. AI theming makes reading those comments cheap.
You can build both survey types from ready-made designs: the CSAT survey template and the NPS survey template, or describe your goal to create your survey with AI.
Frequently asked questions
Keep reading
The complete guide to customer satisfaction surveys: proven questions, a ready-to-use template, industry examples, metrics and AI-powered creation and analysis.
Customer satisfaction is the concept; CSAT is one way to measure it. Definitions, examples and how to avoid the common confusion.
Which customer satisfaction metrics to track — CSAT, NPS, CES, distributions, sentiment and themes — and when each is useful.
A step-by-step measurement workflow: pick the journey moment, choose metrics, survey, segment, analyze trends and close the loop.
Track loyalty with a ready-made NPS survey.
Measure satisfaction with a specific experience.
Calculate your Net Promoter Score from raw counts.