TELEPHONE 01206 625222Are your customers truly satisfied?
Particularly for smaller businesses, customer satisfaction feedback is obtained all the time through direct contact with customers. Through these interactions, it is possible to gauge the preferences and expectations of individuals, but this is difficult to formalise and even harder to keep a record of. For this reason, customer satisfaction surveys are vital to measure and track your service levels. By effectively monitoring and acting on data using a customer satisfaction survey company, businesses can implement change to reduce customer churn, gain a higher market share, strengthen their brand, and foster a healthy workplace culture.
"Marketing without data is like driving with your eyes closed."
Dan Zarrella
Maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction is imperative: as of 2020, the UK Customer Satisfaction Index is 76.9, 0.8 points lower than in January 2019 and at its lowest level since July 2015. The latest report by the Institute of Customer Service found that alongside transactional experiences, emotional connection, customer ethos and ethics have become more prominent as drivers of customer satisfaction.
Customer satisfaction surveys not only provide points for improvement, but can solidify what companies are doing well, thereby justifying investment and highlighting potential USPs. Satisfied customers are often silent - it is customers with specific complaints who are the most vocal. By enabling happy customers to feed back their views, it is possible to encourage customer loyalty and obtain testimonials.
Our customer satisfaction surveys take a measurement of how satisfied or happy the customer is with a product, service or specific point of interaction. In this sense, we ask if the product or service has met with their expectations, met their needs, and if issues have arisen, have they been resolved. Satisfaction tells you how likely a customer is to recommend your product or service. Satisfaction is a great way to explore service levels across different teams or areas of a business from customer service right through to billing and accounts - here it can highlight service areas that require training or extra resources.
Our surveys are pitched at multiple levels, from umbrella ratings, such as overall satisfaction with a business, to very specific questions relating to stages of the purchase process. Typically questions will ask respondents to rate the area of investigation on a numerical scale. This can also incorporate Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS is calculated by asking a key question, using a 0-10 scale: 'How likely is it that you would recommend [business name] to a friend or colleague?' The most effective customer satisfaction surveys make important up front considerations about objectives, methodology, questionnaire design, timescales, analysis, reporting methods, and incentives.
We start by identifying the objectives of your customer satisfaction survey and look at the specific information that you require. We then build the customer satisfaction questionnaire based on the information that you 'need' and avoid as much as possible information that you would 'like' to know. This ensures that the questionnaire is not biased in its design and that it is as short as possible, therefore reducing questionnaire fatigue which results in a respondent just giving up.
Questionnaire design is a crucial element to a successful customer satisfaction survey. As a rule of thumb, we recommend keeping the length of customer satisfaction survey questionnaires within 20-25 questions. However, most questionnaires usually contain a variety of different question formats, and therefore it is important to also consider questionnaire length in terms of time. We would recommend keeping customer satisfaction survey completion times to about 5 minutes (give or take the odd extended explanation).
As an experienced customer satisfaction survey company, we generally advise our business to business customer satisfaction survey clients to avoid certain times of the year. These would usually be August and December as standard, although other times may apply according to the sector. For instance, we know that accountants hate to be bothered during busy tax return periods!
The customer satisfaction survey response rate will depend upon a number of factors but the most significant are:
In order to maximise the value of our customer satisfaction research, we use best practice techniques combined with our experience in the customer satisfaction survey field. We have achieved over 80% response rates for online customer satisfaction surveys and telephone customer satisfaction surveys and will sometimes used mixed methodologies to maximise a response.
Although the process of conducting a customer satisfaction survey can be therapeutic in itself, it is the post-survey analysis, response and action that will ultimately determine how useful and effective the customer satisfaction survey process has been. Particular attention is paid to verbatim commentary whilst conducting customer satisfaction survey interviews.
We treat every project individually and not a templated 'one product fits all approach'. Our tailored research services ensure that results are statistically sound and relevant to the needs of the client that has commissioned them. All market research projects are managed by a Senior Market Researcher or Company Director and are conducted following strict ethical guidelines as laid down by the Market Research Society (MRS).
Our customer satisfaction surveys typically follow a set process, with timescales being arranged based on the client's specific requirements and objectives:
We use customer satisfaction survey company best practice combined with our experience in the field of customer satisfaction surveys to ensure that response rates are as high as possible. We recommend an introductory letter (we can supply an appropriate template) from a senior person from within your organisation to communicate the importance of the customer satisfaction survey research to your customers.
We clearly communicate the value of responding to your customers and that they have the opportunity to help shape the future of the service they receive. The use of an appropriate customer satisfaction survey incentive is important as is the design of the customer satisfaction survey questionnaire and the customer satisfaction survey methodology.
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