How to Measure Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty

Many companies don’t know how to measure customer satisfaction, although most companies agree that customer satisfaction is an important factor in profitability and increasing revenue. The best way to gauge customer satisfaction is with a well-designed customer satisfaction survey.

Surveying customers about their satisfaction can be more complex than it might appear. Designing a customer satisfaction survey that will deliver actionable insight takes more than asking a few questions. It requires expertise in survey design and a knowledge of psychology.

The survey questionnaire is the first important factor in the success of your customer satisfaction survey. The survey questions require careful attention to the format to ensure that the question doesn’t promote a biased response. In addition, a balanced scale for responses also promotes unbiased results.

The deployment methods of online, telephone, or paper can also influence the results. It is important to ensure that your entire population has equal access to the deployment method. That may require a questionnaire written in multiple languages, or it may mean that telephone or paper may be the only viable methods if a substantial portion of your sample don’t have Internet or email access.

It is also important to measure confidence level and sampling error to ensure that you receive enough responses to be certain that your sample size is large enough to represent the entire population. You can create customer satisfaction surveys online yourself using free or inexpensive tools, but some services are inadequate in the assistance they offer with survey design and deployment.

Understanding both the qualitative and quantitative results in a way that provides actionable insight is also beyond the capabilities of some online services. Graphs only go so far in understanding results. To be meaningful, you must measure trends over time and it is useful to apply benchmarks comparing your customer satisfaction survey results to those of competitors or other companies.

You may find it helpful to deploy additional pulse type customer satisfaction surveys after taking action to measure the success of specific changes.

You will begin to see a rise in order frequency and order size as customers find your company easier to do business with, and as they see that you have taken actions based on their input.

NBRI helps organizations just like yours by combining powerful research with deep analytics. If you’re ready to join their ranks, here’s how we can help: