Two categories of customer satisfaction studies exist. The first is a more strategic “Full Satisfaction” study, and the second is used primarily as a management tool.
The Full Satisfaction study includes many metrics on many topics. Through the analysis, we identify which are the most important topics. From this, management can decide which of those issues they want to focus on. These issues are placed into the second type of study – “Event Driven” satisfaction.
Event Driven studies are used to provide 360-degree feedback to the front lines. Results are provided down to the lowest level possible. This may be a retail outlet, an office, or feedback on a specific event that occurs infrequently but is highly relevant. You can read more about this in the “Event Driven” satisfaction survey summary.
The Process
The ideal process is to interview client facing associates to understand what they believe to be the most important dimensions leading to satisfaction. Then we prefer to interview just a handful of customers to get their perspective – which is more often than not different than that of the associates.
From this feedback, we can design the questionnaire and field the study.
Analysis and Deliverables
After all of our data quality checks, we will determine the drivers of satisfaction – those dimensions that most lead to satisfaction, referral, and retention.
When identifying these drivers, we do not rely on what respondents to tell us – we analytically determine the drivers. This does two things for us:
1.It ensures we get the real reasons, not just the reasons they want to tell us
2.We can keep the questionnaire shorter by avoiding these stated importance questions. This gives us more questionnaire space to include more dimensions.
Once we have this, we can build the following grid. This grid is a favorite of management and typically is a key component within the executive summary. This clearly tells management where to focus (and perhaps what set of questions need to be added to the Event Level study).
