Best Practices: Why Customer Satisfaction Studies Fail

Spending on customer satisfaction studies continues to outpace overall market research spend in the US, and yet there is a generalized dissatisfaction with the value that companies get from such studies. They continue because there is an intrinsic belief that they should be good for business. This belief is not misplaced, but many studies suffer from intrinsic flaws, ranging from measuring the wrong thing from a customer perspective to looking for a simple metric that does not provide management guidance as to what to fix if scores are low. The keys to a successful satisfaction study include measuring what is important to customers, segmenting customers by their intrinsic value to your business, and including some key driver questions that we detail. Done correctly, a satisfaction study will not only tell you how satisfied your customers are, but how such satisfaction ties to your bottom line, and how much effort you should put into trying to raise your satisfaction scores.