Customer Loyalty Marketing Surveys:
Are you including all 3 critical elements
By Adam Ramshaw
(Director)
For reprint permission please email
info@genroe.com.au
The starting point when designing customer loyalty programs should be understanding
what your customers care about and how well you are meeting their expectations.
Unfortunately, many attempts at customer satisfaction measurement fail to include
all three critical elements in the customer loyalty marketing survey and so fail to provide
useful information to the business.
By not including all three critical elements the results of many customer loyalty
surveys are worthless. Don’t get me wrong, they are often interesting but ultimately
worthless because you get results but have no idea what to do with them.
For instance, have you ever heard these comments after you distributed your results internally?
"Gee, we scored 76 for customer satisfaction this month I wonder if that’s good
enough?"
"Wow, we improved 10 points from our last customer loyalty survey I wonder why?"
"Oh no, our customers really hammered us on documentation but I don’t know if that
matters or even how to improve it."
Moving from interesting but worthless results to interesting and useful results is
not actually that hard. In fact all you have to do is start with a customer satisfaction
measurement approach that includes three critical elements.
1. Overall Customer Satisfaction index/indices questions
It seems odd to me that many customer loyalty surveys never ask these key questions.
They ask loads of detailed questions about the color of this and the time for that
but at the end of the day you need to know how much customers like you as a business
and match that to customer loyalty, i.e. profit.
Luckily this is a simple problem to solve because there are really only two questions
that you can ask:
- "Please think about all of your experiences with Company X. Please rate your overall
satisfaction in your dealings with them, where 10 is very satisfied and 1 is very
dissatisfied?"
This is the standard customer satisfaction question and research has shown that the
higher the score on this question the higher the customer loyalty. But be warned,
for most industries the relationship is not linear and you need to be rating very
high on this scale (9s and 10s) to have real impact on loyalty.
- "How likely is it that you would recommend Company X to a friend or colleague, where
10 is very likely and 1 is very unlikely?"
This second question has been popularised by the research done by Frederick Reicheld
and his development of the Net Promoter Score*. Analysed correctly this has been
shown to be a very good indicator of customer loyalty.
2. Satisfaction driver questions
Now that you have an overall customer satisfaction measurement you need to understand
what drives customer satisfaction for your business. To do this you need to include
a set of questions that measure your performance on the different drivers of customer
satisfaction in your business. The goal here is to understand how you perform on
each driver AND determine which drivers are most important.
These are the most common questions you see in surveys, for example:
"How do you rate the technical competence of our staff?"
"How accurate and complete was our documentation?"
"Did we answer the phone quickly enough?"
With this information and a little bit of statistical analysis (correlation and regression
techniques) you can determine which elements of your business are most important
in driving customer satisfaction.
3. How can we improve questions
So with the previous two question types you know your customer satisfaction level,
which elements of your business drive customer loyalty and your score on each element.
Okay, you’re at the final hurdle you know what is wrong and what needs fixing but
how do you fix it? This is where the last element comes in: how can we improve questions.
There are two versions of this question: general and specific
- General questions cast the net widely and get the top of mind response for you whole
business:
"Please tell us the one thing you would like to see changed about us?"
- Specific questions are tied to a single attribute:
"How could we improve our responsiveness to you?"
Notice both types of question are open (no scores out of 10) responses. Using them
you should get some good ideas about how to improve your business.
Well, now you have everything that you need to improve customer loyalty. The only
thing left to do is get out and make changes to your business. Oh and then do it
all over again next quarter – remember customer satisfaction is a journey, there
is no perfect customer satisfaction.
*Source: "The one number you need to grow", Frederick Reicheld, Harvard Business
Review December 2003
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