Customer Satisfaction Research White Papers

“Six Compelling Reasons for Tracking Customer Satisfaction”

Customer focused strategies, including routine measurement of their perceptions toward service performance, impact customer retention and acquisition, employee morale and productivity, financial performance, market share and, if successful, can create a sustainable competitive advantage. These strategies are based on the following premise; the best way to provide quality service is to use direct customer input to discover customer expectations and how to exceed those expectations; a customer whose expectations have been exceeded will walk away from the experience with a positive image of the company and will tell others about it; the type of quality service achieved through this philosophy is the difference between profitable and unprofitable companies; and, there is nothing more expensive than a dissatisfied customer who switches to the competitor.

“Five Important Considerations When Choosing Customer Satisfaction Survey Questions”

Customer satisfaction research can be effective only if it measures what customers themselves say is important to them. These are the perceptions that will ultimately influence repurchase or decisions to recommend and, therefore, are the appropriate opinions to be captured and reported. Typically, prior to starting a tracking program, an exploratory research phase is conducted to uncover the entire “domain” of factors by which a customer might evaluate a company and its product and service offerings. Analyzing the results of this baseline data can reveal the most important factors in terms of their impact on overall satisfaction and loyalty.

“Seven Important Decisions for Structuring a Customer Satisfaction Tracking Program”

This paper presents guidelines for building and implementing an on-going customer satisfaction measurement program that can be adopted by any company. Regardless of the industry, there are several key elements common to successful measurement programs, including determining the most important service attributes that drive retention, establishing a feedback system to make sure the customer information gets to the individual or group responsible for taking action, designing an appropriate measurement and reward systems to encourage the desired actions by all employees and a very strong and demonstrated commitment from upper management.

“Gap Analysis: The Foundation of Customer Satisfaction Research”

Customer satisfaction research can help companies become customer focused by revealing the gaps between customers’ expectations and their perceptions of the companies’ performance in meeting those expectations. Proven measurements with high correlations with repurchase intent are quality perceptions, value for the money, whether the customer would recommend the company to a friend or associate and the likelihood of repurchasing. Quality customer-focused research uses many or all of these.