This guide explains step by step how a customer satisfaction analysis is carried out and what needs to be considered.
Satisfied customers come back. They recommend products to others. Leave positive reviews, maybe buy more in the future. Satisfied customers are a decisive factor in the success of a company. But their needs are constantly increasing, competition is growing. A company needs to offer something to their customers in order to keep them satisfied.
It is therefore important to regularly check how customers feel about products or services. Because only those who know what attitude a customer has towards a company will be able to satisfy them in the future. The customer satisfaction survey is one of the classics of market research.
On this page, the market research experts from Appinio explain how customer satisfaction can be measured and what should be considered in a feedback study.
Net Promoter Score
How likely is it that you would recommend product X / service X to your friends, relatives or colleagues?
Customer Effort Score
This means that you would like to know from the customers why they would recommend a product or why not. This question is called "Voice of Customer" (VOC). Here the customer has the opportunity to write down the reasons for their dissatisfaction. Companies can use the answers to learn more about their customers.
Calculating the NPS is easy and quick. The evaluation is simple and can be easily interpreted. Therefore, the NPS is very suitable to be included in a customer satisfaction survey, for example in a standardized questionnaire. Determining NPS and VOC is usually the beginning of a long process in a company. It can be used to find causes for dissatisfaction in order to align future strategies accordingly.
Compared to the two metrics described above, the "Customer Effort Score" does not measure how satisfied customers are with a product or service, but how much effort they have to put in to get a product or service related request answered by a company. It is therefore about the customer experience. You just ask them one question:
How much effort did you feel you had to put in to get your request processed by Company X?
The possible answers range from 1 (very low effort) to 5 (very high effort).
The Customer Effort Score (CES)was presented in 2010 by Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman and Nicholas Toman as a metric for customer satisfaction in the Harvard Business Review. In a study with more than 75,000 participants, they found that service customers who received a quick, simple solution to their problems with a product from a company were much more likely to become customers of that company again.
Of those survey participants who indicated that they felt their expenses were very low, 94 percent later said that they would buy from that company again and 88 percent of them said that they would even be willing to pay a higher price. This makes the CES a meaningful predictor of customer loyalty. It can be included in a customer satisfaction questionnaire together with the NPS or CSAT.
The measurement of customer satisfaction can also be part of brand tracking.
Step 1: Define your target group
Before starting a customer satisfaction analysis, the target group must be defined precisely. Who are my customers? Do I want to get feedback from everyone, or only from certain subgroups? For example, a stationery manufacturer might only want to survey schoolchildren, a canteen only customers who eat vegetarian food and a shoe company might only want to know the opinion of customers who exercise on a regular basis. In digital market research, these customers can be identified by using screening questions. When selecting the target group, it should also be determined how many customers are to be interviewed. It is definitely impossible to interview all customers. Therefore, only one sample of people is recruited for a study.
Step 2: Design of the Questionnaire
Once it is clear who is to be interviewed, the appropriate questionnaire for a satisfaction survey can be designed. There are a few things to consider when proceeding. Information about how a good questionnaire is designed can be found in our survey guide. The questions are selected with regard to what a company wishes to know from its customers. These include, for example, the questions described above about the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Effect Score (CES). The bottom part of this page contains examples of other questions that can be included in a customer satisfaction questionnaire.
Before a study is conducted, it should be determined how long the survey should take and by when the results should be available. Before the questionnaire is handed out to customers, it should be tested several times to find out whether it meets certain quality criteria. In this way it is possible to find out how long participants need to complete the survey or if there are any uncertainties.
Step 3: Evaluate the data
The evaluation of a customer satisfaction survey is based on a descriptive analysis. Mean values and frequencies are calculated and the distribution of the answers is described by means of variance and standard deviation. When analyzing the data, it is also possible to split respondents into groups again. For example, one could only look at the answers of women and compare them with the answers that men gave.
Step 4: Drawing conclusions
Once the results and their analysis and evaluation of a customer satisfaction analysis are available, conclusions can be drawn. What does the result of the analysis mean for the company? Are customers satisfied, or even extremely dissatisfied? Based on the given data, advice can be given on how these customers might be satisfied in the future. However, it is equally important to take a closer look at the dissatisfied customers - they should be seen as a learning factor. Finally, data from the satisfaction analysis form the basis of future corporate strategies and marketing campaigns.
The satisfaction of consumers should be measured on a regular basis, for example in the context of brand tracking studies. In this way, different values, which were collected at different times, can be compared with each other. Furthermore, satisfaction tracking can be used to check the effectiveness of measures used in order to increase satisfaction.