Definitions and Glossary
Customer Satisfaction Score
Customer Satisfaction Index

Customer satisfaction scores and customer satisfaction indices are an attempt to measure how satisfied customers are with the performance of the company. The assumption being that the more satisfied a customer is the more likely that are to stay as a customer.

Different organisations use different approaches to measure customer satisfaction but they all tend to fall into two main approaches:

Customer Satisfaction Index

A customer satisfaction index combines the customer survey scores from different business attributes to create a single customer satisfaction index that indicates the overall customer satisfaction.

For example adding the customer survey scores for responsiveness, cleanliness, product quality and price then dividing by four. This give an index with the same range as each of the attribute scores.

The main issue with this approach is determining how important each attribute is in driving customer satisfaction. For example, in reality, your customer satisfaction may be 60% based on price and 10% on each of the other attributes. If that is the case the index created above would give an inaccurate result.

Customer Satisfaction Score

The other approach is to use a single question in the survey to rate customer satisfaction. There has been lots of research over the year to determine which is the best question to ask.

This does not suffer from the issue above and attempts to directly measure a customer’s satisfaction.

The following two questions have become quite popular as customer satisfaction score questions:

• 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?
  
  
• 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?