CX metric

Satisfaction Level Indicator (SLI)

SLI is Qmeter’s single-number customer-experience score. It measures your current satisfaction against the best possible result — so every piece of feedback, from every channel, rolls up into one percentage you can track, benchmark across branches, and act on.

SLI = (Current case × 100) / Best case
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Built into every Qmeter plan — measured automatically from your feedback.

67.4Example SLI
−1000+100
The scale

One question. Five levels. One score.

Ask a single rated question after any interaction. Each answer maps to a weight from +10 to −10 — good experiences add value, bad ones subtract it.

Excellent+1050 to 100Service at its best — customers are happy and need nothing more.
Good+50 to 50Doing well, but something is missing — find it and fix it.
Neutral00A warning sign. Satisfaction is at risk and needs real work.
Bad−5−50 to 0Something is going wrong. Act before customers leave.
Unacceptable−10−100 to −50Fundamental service failure — change course immediately.
The formula

How the SLI formula works

SLI compares what you actually scored against the best you could have scored. Here is a worked example from 250 collected responses.

Step 1

Best case

If every one of the 250 responses were Excellent (+10):

250 × 10 = 2,500
Step 2

Current case

Actual mix — Excellent 181, Good 26, Neutral 4, Bad 27, Unacceptable 12:

(181×10) + (26×5) + (4×0) + (27×−5) + (12×−10) = 1,685
Step 3

Your SLI

Current × 100 ÷ Best case:

1,685 × 100 / 2,500 = 67.4

Want the full method, thresholds and history? Read the complete SLI guide.

SLI vs CSAT

SLI vs CSAT: what’s the difference?

CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) is the industry-standard “how satisfied were you?” metric. SLI is Qmeter’s comparative score. They answer related but different questions.

CSATSLI
What it measuresThe share of customers who say they are satisfied.Overall service quality versus the best possible result.
Typical scale% satisfied (top-2-box on a 1–5 or 1–3 scale).One score from −100 to 100.
How it is scoredCounts “satisfied” answers; how dissatisfied the rest were is ignored.Weights every answer (+10 … −10), so a bad experience actively pulls the score down.
Bad experiencesA “very dissatisfied” and a “neutral” both simply are not “satisfied”.Severity is priced in — Unacceptable costs −10, Bad −5.
BenchmarkingEasy to compare against published industry CSAT norms.Built to compare branch-to-branch and period-to-period against your own best case.
Best forA simple, universally understood satisfaction headline.One operational score that flags where service is actually failing.

Neither is “wrong”. CSAT is simpler and universally recognised; SLI is more sensitive to service failures and more comparable across a network. That is why Qmeter measures — and reports — both.

Why SLI

Why we recommend leading with SLI

One score, built for operators who need to see — and compare — service quality across many locations.

One number for the whole operation

Every channel and touchpoint rolls into a single score, so leadership sees service health at a glance — not ten disconnected metrics.

It prices in bad experiences

Negative weights mean a run of Bad and Unacceptable ratings drags SLI down fast. A plain 0–100 average can hide the same damage.

Comparable across branches and time

Because SLI benchmarks against your best possible case, a branch in Baku and a branch in Dubai are measured on exactly the same yardstick.

Clear thresholds for action

Positive is healthy, 0 is a warning, negative is urgent. The number tells you not just how you are doing, but when to act.

−10

One Unacceptable experience costs your score ten points — the exact mirror of what it does to the customer relationship. Measuring severity, not just an average, is how you catch the damage while the customer can still be saved.

how SLI weights failure

SLI is the default — not the only option.

Prefer to report on CSAT, NPS or CES? Qmeter measures those from the same feedback, so you can lead with SLI and still show the metric your board expects — or track several side by side. Compare them in our NPS vs CSAT vs CES guide, or see how the scores appear in Analytics & AI reports.

FAQ

SLI — frequently asked questions

How is SLI (Satisfaction Level Indicator) calculated?

SLI = (Current case × 100) / Best case. Every feedback answer is mapped to a score — Excellent +10, Good +5, Neutral 0, Bad −5, Unacceptable −10. The sum of your actual scores is the current case; the total you would have scored if every answer were Excellent is the best case. Scaled to 100, the ratio is your SLI.

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