How important is getting a handle on just how well your products or services are satisfying your customers? Incredibly. Undeniably. Important.
Customer satisfaction leads to customer loyalty which leads to customers who return time and again. Oh, and those satisfied customers share their satisfying experiences with their friends, family, co-workers and neighbors who, with any luck, will also become satisfied customers who share their satisfying experience. And the cycle repeats. Hopefully.
Discovering what is both satisfying as well as not-so-pleasing in the minds of your customers can take the “luck” out of retaining them as well as increasing the number of satisfied customers spreading the good word about your company.
It’s helpful to gauge the relational measure of satisfaction with a brand, company or organization as it reveals the customer’s overall level of satisfaction. But wise business owners should be eager to dig deeper, to flesh out the nitty-gritty details, as one of the best ways to improve the customer experience is to thoroughly understand what is working and what needs attention.
Foundational elements that lead to useful feedback include the exploration of:
The emotion behind the overall satisfaction measurement as it relates to quality, perceived reliability and extent of fulfillment of customer’s need
The loyalty measurement that involves brand satisfaction, repurchase likelihood and recommendation potential
The context by which product attributes and benefits are determined. An example: “How satisfied are you with the appearance…” and “How important is the appearance…”
The intention to repurchase in the future
The bad news: There’s no one-size-fits-all formula for measuring how happy or unhappy the consumer is with any particular company or product. The good news: there are many tools that will reveal valuable information that, when compiled and analyzed, will provide a useful means of measuring customer satisfaction.
Many companies rely on surveys to provide a picture of customer satisfaction. Strive for a simple, easy to complete format. Skip the quality rankings where five or, help us all, ten items must be ranked in the order of importance to the consumer. This too difficult process will cause many people to simply toss the survey. Forgo the drawn out questions that must be re-read to decipher. Provide ample space for the comments and feedback yet keep the survey to one page, again, to encourage completion and to simply faxing. Check out these survey templates.
Other tools include:
Feedback cards
Interviews
Mystery Shops
Monitoring
When using any of the above methods, incorporate OPEN questions that require more than a “yes” or “no” answer. Formulate “who”, “what”, “when”, “why”, “how” questions that require thought on the part of the consumer.
Incorporate these strategies into the various means of information gathering:
Approaches that connect with customers before, during and after the purchase
Inquiries about the entire experience including product quality, customer service, ordering, delivery, billing
A comprehensive source for information and services relating to the measurement of customer satisfaction is the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ASCI). Their services provide science-based insights across the compete arc of the customer experience.
Allow ASJ Partners to guide you toward the best avenues for highlighting the positive, satisfying customer experiences your targeted methods reveal. Contact us today.
