Why CSAT isn’t enough for modern IT leaders
For decades, Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) has been the default measure of IT performance.
It’s familiar, it’s simple, and it appears to give leaders a sense of control. It’s just one number, averaged across thousands of tickets, telling us whether things are “good enough.” But the truth is that CSAT hasn’t evolved, even though IT has. That gap is now too wide to ignore.
After years spent running global service operations and now working with hundreds of organizations on their IT experience strategies, I’ve seen the same pattern repeat: CSAT gives you a line on a dashboard, but not the truth behind the line. It tells you something, but not enough to make better decisions.
CSAT was never designed for modern IT
CSAT was born in the 1950s. It grew over time across industries long before digital workplaces existed. Even today, it continues to measure something the way it always has, which is a single interaction, rated after the fact, without context. That’s the point we need to accept, because IT today isn’t a series of isolated moments. It’s a continuous, interconnected experience that shapes how people work, collaborate, and feel.
Yet CSAT still reduces all of that to a 1–5 star rating! It does not tell you:
- Why they score it a specific number
- Whether the issue cost them 30 minutes or 9 hours
- Whether certain groups of people are struggling more than others
- Whether the incident and request fulfilment processes or practices are broken
- Whether culture or geography affects how they rate you
- Whether the score reflects fear, reciprocity or habit
In other words, CSAT doesn’t measure the experience.
When a good score hides a bad reality
There is one case from a real customer scenario that illustrates the flaw perfectly.
Their SAP tickets were scoring +93 (on an NPS scale) in happiness, which is seemingly an incredible result on paper. But when we looked deeper, we saw something else: the average perceived time lost for those same tickets was 9 hours. Think about that. People were happy… while losing a full working day! CSAT alone would have told IT, “All good here! Move along.”
Experience data showed the truth: this was a high-impact problem hiding in plain sight. Simple changes, such as routing the right tickets directly to the SAP team, saved 5 hours of lost time per ticket. The lesson is: you can’t fix what you can’t see, and CSAT doesn’t let you see enough.
Cultural bias and “gaming” make CSAT even less reliable
We’ve all seen how easy it is for CSAT to be managed to a target, even unintentionally:
- Only surveying certain user groups
- Sending surveys only when you expect a good outcome
- Allowing reciprocal scoring (e.g., “I’ll give you a five so I stay a five”)
- Or, most commonly: rating behaviour that differs wildly by culture
A service that gets 4.8 in the US might get 3.9 in Finland – for the exact same experience. A team might hit 4.1 every month, not because they improved, but because the SLA contract requires it. Some organizations have hit the same score for years because everyone learned how to “keep the number green.” At that point, CSAT stops being a measurement. It becomes a show.
Experience management is rising because CSAT isn’t enough
Over the last few years, accelerated by the 2020s, IT leaders have realized they need more than a satisfaction score to understand their impact. The shift is clear:
- From CSAT to Experience Indicators
- From measuring the moment to understanding the whole journey
- From an average score to segmented, benchmarked, actionable insights
This is where IT Experience Management (ITXM) comes in. Experience data goes beyond “What score did we get?” It reveals:
- The real reasons behind good or bad experiences
- How much productivity is lost
- Which countries, roles or locations struggle the most
- Whether support teams are achieving outcomes, not just closing tickets
- Patterns in open-text feedback
- How does your performance compare to peers in your industry and region
It shifts IT from saying: “Our CSAT is 4.1.” to saying: “These three issues cause 80% of lost productivity. Here’s how we’re fixing them and here’s the business impact.”
One of our customers saved 250,000 hours of employee time in a single year by acting on experience insights rather than CSAT averages!
Data only matters when you do something with it
A critical finding from McKinsey confirms something we’ve seen for years: people stop responding to surveys when they don’t believe anything will change. This is why CSAT response rates drop and why experience programs thrive. The data becomes even more actionable, and the loop strengthens itself.
So Is CSAT Dead?
No. But it’s no longer the main act. CSAT still has a place as a simple interaction measure. But on its own? It’s insufficient, outdated and dangerously misleading. It’s time we stop treating CSAT as the “voice of the customer” and start treating it as what it is: a small part of a much bigger story. Experience management is the rest of that story.
And in 2026, at a global conference dedicated to service excellence, this is the story we need to tell. Because IT can’t afford to make decisions based on guesswork. Not anymore. Not when the tools, insights and methods to understand real experience are available and proven.
A Call to Leaders at Spark 26
If I could leave you with one challenge, it would be this: Don’t let a single score define the truth.
Look deeper. Listen better. And give your people a way to tell you what really matters. Because once you start measuring experience, not just satisfaction, everything changes: the way teams work, the way decisions get made, the way IT is valued. And yes, it will change your outcomes too.
