Measuring Customer Satisfaction

There are always a lot of questions about customer satisfaction survey methodology. Like with all survey research projects, the first step is to clearly define the goals of your customer satisfaction marketing survey. One of the goals when measuring customer satisfaction should be to increase customer satisfaction in ways that will maximize the value of long term customer relationships. I often see people developing customer satisfaction surveys that fail to collect data to help organizations do this. Instead, their satisfaction questionnaires simply categorize clients into a satisfied or dissatisfied pile based on the response to one overall satisfaction question.

In the past, I've heard people compare measuring customer satisfaction to measuring an individual's level of intelligence. I think it's a good example for understanding why one overall satisfaction is not a reliable means of gauging satisfaction among customers. If you are asked to take a test intended to gauge how smart you are and you open the test booklet to find a single question:

Chances are, you wouldn't think it was a good gauge of your intelligence - in fact, it wouldn't even tell the researcher how observant you are as a person. That's because how intelligent someone is cannot be reduced to a single question, intelligence is multidimensional. The same is true for measuring customer satisfaction, you cannot get a true understanding of how satisfied a client is or isn't by asking a single question.

What does this mean to you when starting your next questionnaire builder? If you select a quantitative research method, like surveying, be sure to include a series of questions aimed at gaining an understanding of customer satisfaction levels. Keep in mind your goals and how you could increase satisfaction in ways that will transfer into actionable items for the organization. When analyzing the survey data, don't just lump customers into satisfied and dissatisfied categories. You should be assigning degrees of satisfaction based on the responses.