Did you ever get that weird feeling when your latest customer‑satisfaction score suddenly shows more 3s and 2s than 5s? You’re not alone. We all love a shiny metric, especially when it connects directly to business results. But the dream of holding your CSAT at “very satisfied” forever is just that, a dream. Humans simply don’t work that way, and neither do products. Let’s check why and what to do when the numbers start sliding.
Why Satisfaction Fades
You know the saying: “You can’t make everyone happy because you’re not a burrito”? The same goes for satisfaction of customers. Here’s why:
- Negativity Bias: Research from the Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g) has tracked CSAT scores since 1999. They show that websites have become faster and more usable over time. Yet users’ satisfaction ratings haven’t risen at the same pace 1.
- One reason is (1) our negativity bias: We tend to weight negative experiences more heavily than positive ones. One buggy form can outweigh ten delightful interactions.
- This effect is amplified by the (2) the peak‑end rule 2. We remember the last and most emotionally intense moments of an experience, not the average.
- Add (3) the halo effect: a single great or poor interaction can colour the entire experience, often for the worse.
- This is why CSAT scores often dip or stagnate despite real improvements. (For a deeper dive, watch Jakob Nielsen’s keynote part on User Satisfaction in The Immutable Rules of UX from 2019, video linked below.)
- Hedonic Adaptation: Research into the “hedonic treadmill” finds humans quickly return to a baseline satisfaction, regardless of positive or negative events 3. That new feature? It simply wears off over time as your brain normalises the convenience.
- Rising Expectations: NN/g notes that users compare your product against the best experiences from all other sites and apps they use. If Amazon or Apple raise the bar, your once‑acceptable checkout can suddenly feel clunky.
- This isn’t just B2C phenomenon. In 2024, a Forrester and Digital Commerce 360 survey found that only 36 % of B2B buyers rated their e‑commerce experience an “A”, while 49 % gave it a “B”.
- Even with heavy investment, Forrester reported that just 6 % of brands improved customer experience that year 4.
- ‘Wows’ Become ‘Musts’: Noriaki Kano encompasses the aforementioned phenomena by classifying features into must-haves, performance needs, and delighters 5. His insight: today’s “wows” quickly become tomorrow’s “wants” and then baseline “musts“.
- Example: Free hotel Wi‑Fi was a novelty more than a decade ago; now it’s expected. The same shift has happened with free shipping and face recognition your phone.
CSAT Tracks Change …
Think of CSAT like a heart-rate monitor. It shows whether things are trending up or down. However, it doesn’t explain the cause. You can understand drop like an early warning sign for change 6. And because CSAT surveys are taken after an interaction, it also means the poor experience has already reached customers. Thus, CSAT is most useful when viewed alongside other signals like retention, churn and product usage. Watch the trend to identify changes. Then, look beyond the number to discover the story behind it.
Satisfaction isn’t static. Cognitive biases (negativity bias, peak‑end rule, halo effect), hedonic adaptation and rising expectations all push scores down over time. Your job isn’t to fight human psychology, but to understand it and design accordingly. I will explain this in more detail in the next part below.
What To Do When Scores Drop
- Triangulate the data: Yeah, I know you have heard it many times. It’s true though. Don’t look at CSAT in isolation. Compare it with support tickets. Assess behaviour analytics and qualitative research results. This will help determine whether dips correlate with churn or reduced spend.
- Find the root cause: Go back to your users, observe them and run targeted usability tests. Ask whether the problem is with the product, service or something else. Because CSAT is a lagging indicator 7 you need leading insights from direct research to understand what went wrong.
- Act strategically: Move quickly but base decisions on context data. Fix issues that affect retention and loyalty. Share insights across teams to align on solution and avoid silo fixing. Sometimes this means improving core functionality rather than polishing minor details to bump a score by addressing the real pain points.
Addressing Executive Hesitation
For a CEO or CIO, investing in UX or CX can seem optional. In reality, customer satisfaction metrics serve as early warning signs for churn and highlight opportunities to increase revenue and upsell. Higher satisfaction consistently correlates with stronger retention, repeat purchases, and referrals.
On the other hand, poor experiences carry hidden costs: more support tickets, higher churn, and long-term damage to the brand. I won’t say that throwing money at CX/UX doesn’t guarantee higher sales, but not investing strategically almost certainly leads to decline.
A well-designed UX program, one that pairs quantitative metrics with qualitative insights and links them to business outcomes, acts as an insurance policy against losing customers.
How To Keep Up As The Bar Rises
Don’t rely on CSAT alone for your reasoning: Mix qualitative with quantitative research: pair survey data with contextual inquiries or moderated usability sessions to uncover the why behind the numbers. They reveal when novelty wars off, while MaxDiff surveys 8 for example help to prioritise what features are most important. The KANO model can even help you to categorise features according to customer’s delight perception and revisit them periodically.
Benchmark against yourself and the market: Track objective metrics like task success, time on task, error rates alongside subjective. The User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) offers for example a standard benchmark. Compare with competitor’s experiences to see if satisfaction dips because you slipped or because the entire market jumped ahead.
Think strategically rather than tactically: CSAT trends are signals not verdicts. When you see a dip, resist the urge to patch a single pain point. Look at how needs are evolving and feed those insights into your product roadmap, so you’re leading rather than playing catch‑up.
A Perfect CSAT Score Isn’t The Goal…
… Continuous improvement is. I know this sounds a bit corny. Humans will always normalise improvements. They remember pain more vividly than pleasure. The bar will always rise. By using user research, you can stay ahead of those shifts. Add a sprinkle of delight when you can. Accept that a mix of 2s and 3s is not a failure but a reflection of reality.
This article was created with Generative AI support.
Footnotes
- The Negativity Bias in User Experience – NN/g. Also: “The Immutable Rules of UX (Jakob Nielsen Keynote)” on Youtube, accessed Aug. 9th 2025 ↩︎
- Peak-end-rule – refers to the fact that humans rate an experience based on how they felt at it’s most intense moment and at its end. ↩︎
- Psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell introduced this idea in their 1971 paper “Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society“ (reviewed by the decisionlab.com). They argued that people adapt to positive and negative events and return to a baseline level of well‑being. A famous follow‑up study by Brickman, Coates and Janoff‑Bulman in 1978 compared recent lottery winners and accident victims: both groups reported similar levels of happiness before and after the events, showing that the happiness boost (or drop) fades. Recent work by Sonja Lyubomirsky in 2005 has refined the theory, suggesting that only about 10 % of happiness is due to circumstances while 40 % is under our control. They note that the hedonic treadmill doesn’t apply uniformly: personality traits, meaningful relationships and pursuing growth‑oriented goals can shift a person’s baseline upwards.
↩︎ - Forrester’s US 2023 Customer Experience Index: Brands’ CX Quality Falls For A Second Consecutive Year ↩︎
- What is the KANO Model? – ASQ ↩︎
- Simon-Kucher – how important are customer satisfaction metrics? ↩︎
- A lagging indicator reflects what has already happened rather than predicting what will happen. It tells you how a process or system performed after the fact. CSAT scores are considered lagging indicators because they are collected after a customer has experienced your product or service. They are often contrasted with “leading indicators” that are forward-looking signals that can hint at what’s to come, e.g: Support ticket volume etc. ↩︎
- MaxDiff = Maximum Difference, is a type of survey where respondents are shown small sets of items (features, benefits, or statements). Additionally they are asked to pick the one they value most and the one they value least. By repeating this with different combinations, researchers can quantify the relative importance or preference for each item across the whole list. ↩︎
Paul Pagel, M.Sc. 