From measurement to satisfaction – How satisfaction surveys help you keep happy customers | weBlog

Who should be asked and what is the best timing?

Deciding, who are the customers to include in your satisfaction measurement is an essential part of the process. Not only the client selection plays an important role in the data you may gather but focusing on specific client cohorts yields higher quality and more accurate data.

Surely, one would like to include all clients, however, for larger companies this might represent a substantial investment on the allocation of their resources and subsequent data processing. Therefore, the company might choose to focus on, e.g. percentage of their most profitable clients, specific number of clients per country, client selection per size or industry, or to leave the selection on their key account managers, who work with the clients firsthand.

The frequency and regularity of measurements shall be also well considered to ensure the clients feel listened to yet not overwhelmed with constant enquiring, even well-meant. For the purposes of certification compliance with various quality standards, you may have to measure customer satisfaction annually; however, it is recommended to do it more frequently, while the clients are still engaged and willing to provide good quality feedback, for instance post-purchase, post-implementation of a new service or quarterly. Clients unhappy with your services for a longer time are more likely to reject your approach and not provide any relevant response, or just leave without disclosing the issues to remedy.

How to choose the best method? 

Satisfaction can be measured in many ways through qualitative or quantitative methods of data collection. The selection of both or their combination depends on the desired complexity of results and current situation.

• Qualitative approach is best applied when you seek full, meaningful answers in your clients’ own words, while you are also curious about their impressions, view or opinions. These can be probed by creating focus groups or asking open-ended questions in surveys. Open-ended questions cannot be answered with a “yes” or “no” responses and allow the respondents to go in-depth, elaborate on their answers, sometimes even name the issues you might not be aware of or consider asking. Qualitative data are richer; however, they require more time spent on their analysis and proper evidence.
• Quantitative approach yields data that have numerical form and, thus, enable easy tracking of changes over time and benchmarking. This approach is ideal when you need to draw general conclusions and gain structured results. Very common metric is a Net Promoter Score (NPS) that measures how likely your customers are to recommend you to their associates on a scale of 0 to 10. NPS provides information on the overall satisfaction of your customers and thanks to its popularity, you can easily benchmark your score against your competition or market average. Originally, NPS was based on a singular question, “How likely are you to recommend the company to a friend or colleague?”. However, it allows for a broader use and various questions to track scores of everything from individual service deliveries, projects, or even staff members.

There is no question whether to measure customer satisfaction or not, only how to design the best measuring method for the selected audience of clients. The earlier we start, the better point of reference we have for improving our service delivery and become the provider of choice not only for new clients but also for the existing ones.