Client / Customer Satisfaction Surveys

The simplest form of customer satisfaction survey is the one in which your customers vote with their feet. It isn't a very helpful customer survey, though, because although they were obviously unhappy, lost customers don't tell you what you can do to improve matters and stop others walking.

Complaints

Many organisations have been content to count complaints and express them as a percentage of transactions. The percentage is usually pretty small, and managers take comfort from this. PR people interviewed on the media can sometimes be heard taking refuge in this spurious "we don't get many complaints, so our customers must be happy" argument and they conclude that they don't need to measure customer satisfaction. The argument is spurious because it ignores the mass of evidence which shows that something like 9 out of 10 dissatisfied customers don't complain. If things get bad enough, and if they have the choice, they just take their business elsewhere.

So just to maintain a static volume of business, any organisation whose customers are free to choose must find enough new customers every year to replace those who have been lost because they got fed up with not getting the quality product or excellent service they wanted, at a price they were willing to pay. This is silly because there is also good evidence to show that the cost of retaining existing customers is much smaller than the cost of winning new ones.

To keep more of your existing customers, one good way to find out what pleases and displeases them is to provide a way they can express their views about your product or service without being identified. A properly run customer satisfaction survey or client satisfaction survey will do this and the survey results provide useful input to your quality improvement programme.

Satisfaction v Importance

When you have run customer satisfaction surveys asking customers or clients about their satisfaction with various aspects of the products or services you offer, it is tempting to think that you should invest the greatest effort and resources into improving the aspects with which customers are least satisfied.

We advise you as well as asking how satisfactory are the various aspects of your offering, also to ask in the client satisfaction surveys how important each one is to the client / customer. Then we create a Priority for Action measure for each aspect of your offering by combining its dissatisfaction index and its importance index.

You can see the Priority for Action report illustrated in our outputs illustrations, and explained in more detail in our article about prioritising initiatives after a survey.