Survey: 34 Percent Would Purchase iPhone if Supported by Carrier

Apple's iPhone still has what it takes!

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Would your employee satisfaction questionnaire yield similar results? From Fast Company...
Source: fastcompany.com

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The 3 Satisfaction Questions You Have to Know!

Writers of client or customer satisfaction surveys debate the most important questions to ask. Measuring satisfaction can be a challenge but choosing the core questions shouldn't be!

Elsewhere, I've written that Fred Reichheld's Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a powerful approach. It turns on asking just  a single rating for the overall relationship. Not for satisfaction directly, but for the customer's willingness to recommend a product or service.

Q1) On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely would you be to recommend [product or service X] to a friend or colleague?

The appeal of a single question, which then yields a single measure, is intuitive. The simpler the measurement process, the more easily it will be understood by those trying to implement your customer satisfaction program. One question, one rating... no Ph.D. required!

That said, many have taken issue with what is perhaps the greatest strength of the NPS - its simplicity. More accurate or reliable results can be obtained, critics argue, by including one or both of the following questions in your client questionnaire.

Q2) Six months from now, how likely is it that you will still be purchasing/using [product or service x]?

Q3) Overall, how satisfied are you with [product or service x]?

The first of the two questions attempts to capture an additional dimension of the satisfaction construct by inquiring about the customer or client's intention to remain a customer. After all, it's easy to imagine situations in which someone would be perfectly willing to recommend a product - but at the same time would not anticipate being a user six months from now. Question #2 provides a glimpse into this dynamic.

Question 3, on the other hand, asks for a straightforward assessment of the customer's current satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the product or service. Why not go right after the concept you're trying to measure, rather than taking the more oblique approaches used in Questions 1 and 2? On the face of it, a reasonable approach. In fact, this is the route taken by many traditional 'satisfaction' surveys. Unfortunately, it turns out in study after study that the standard satisfaction scores show remarkably weak correlations with customer retention and business growth.

Which Ratings to Use in Your Questionnaire?

The strength of the first two questions is that they are much more concrete. The ask about respondents’ intentions to act in certain ways. The third question, on the other hand, asks about a vague and highly subjective emotional state of mind. Somewhat like asking customers to rate their degree of ‘love’ for a product or service.

I have had good experience pairing the first and second questions, while relying on the third as a ‘reality’ check for large discrepancies.

In all cases, the most important question of all is the open-ended follow up that asks customers to say in their own words why they provided the ratings the did – and what it would take to raise their scores. The insights gained from these verbatim responses often leads to far more actionable programs than the ratings themselves.

Make Sure People Will Cry If Your Brand Were to Die

Make Sure People Will Cry If Your Brand Were to Die

The Marketing Fray

We got a hot tip on a Harvard Business Review blog post from Bill Taylor that underscores some of our thinking about ways to improve the ROI of innovation efforts.

In the wake of so many bankruptcies, liquidations, and “flat-out disappearances,” Taylor urges companies ask themselves a question that, “is as profound as it is simple, as well as “worth taking seriously as you evaluate your approach to strategy, competition, and innovation.”

“If your company went out of business tomorrow, would anybody really miss you and why?”

He offers a few reasons why customers might consider you irreplaceable, two of which were particularly relevant to marketers.

Taylor says one reason is because your firm is “providing a product or service so unique that it can’t be provided nearly as well by the five or six other companies that are its main rivals.” Easier said than done, we know. The challenge is to find a product or service that is “so unique,” particularly in long-established or commodity categories, but it CAN be done.

The trick is to identify where the big gaps between the problems customer say they have that they would like a product or service to solve for them and their satisfaction with the solutions currently offered by the players in the market or category. We've got some examples, too.

Citizens Bank did this kind of opportunity analysis and discovered that consumers and small business customers were very tired of not getting personal service from their bank.

Mobil found the same thing in the service stations category—there was no “service.”

Green Mountain Energy, a small energy company in Burlington, VT, uncovered a big beef with the lack of “green” power suppliers.

In each case, these companies successfully developed positionings, products, and services based around solving these problems and their business thrived. Which is why we say directing innovation efforts in towards helping your brand or business become meaningfully unique will go a long way towards becoming indispensable in the minds of your customers.

Taylor also mentions the emotional connection customers have with your brand or business as another reason they’d miss you. We'd make the case that fostering an emotional connection starts by satisfying an as yet unmet customer need or addressing an irritating problem.

In any case, we whole-heartedly agree with Taylor that as companies think about innovation and what to do to encourage growth, they really need to consider whether the decisions they are about to make will make their business or brand irreplaceable.

For more ideas on getting the most out of innovation investments, check out our new white paper, Beyond Luck: Three Steps to Better Innovation ROI.

The Marketing Fray/Copernicus Marketing Consulting and Research

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Andy Perkins

802.318.5165

Scaling the Experience Ladder - Fixes a Broken Link

Scaling The Experience Ladder « GreenBook Market Research Blog

Here's an interesting article that points out how important the choice of rating scales is to your customer feedback efforts. And how so many businesses get it wrong!

Shortly after I took my vehicle in for service, I got a customer satisfaction questionnaire by e-mail. They wanted my ratings in a number of areas ...
www.greenbookblog.org/2010/.../scaling-the-experience-ladd...

Fixed the broken link in the previous post.

Andy

Scaling The Experience Ladder

Scaling The Experience Ladder « GreenBook Market Research Blog

Here's an interesting article that points out how important the choice of rating scales is to your customer feedback efforts. And how so many businesses get it wrong!

Shortly after I took my vehicle in for service, I got a customer satisfaction questionnaire by e-mail. They wanted my ratings in a number of areas ...
www.greenbookblog.org/2010/.../scaling-the-experience-ladd...

Let's let respondents decide what matters

What you can't forget when putting together a client satisfaction survey.

http://www.research-live.com/4003484.article

If the iPad is taken into account, Apple is the world's 3rd largest maker of...

This points out the power of positive customer loyalty and strong user recommendations!

If the iPad is taken into account, Apple is the world's 3rd largest maker of portable computers

via Digital Stats by noreply@blogger.com (Dan) on 8/6/10

"Starting with IDC's global portable computing market share survey for the June 2010 quarter, he has redrawn Apple's (AAPL) share, adding the 3.27 million iPads the company sold in the quarter to its 2.47 million MacBooks and MacBook Pros.
"When including the iPad as part of the NB [notebook] market," [Deutsche Bank's Chris Whitmore] writes, "Apple leapt over Asus, Lenovo, Toshiba and Dell in terms of global unit share."
Viewed this way, Apple goes from being No. 7 in the worldwide portable computer market to No. 3, after only Hewlett Packard (HPQ) and Acer. And it's not stopping there, says Whitmore."
Source:  CNN Money, 2nd August 2010

If the iPad is taken into account, Apple is the world's 3rd largest maker of...

This points out the power of positive customer loyalty and strong user recommendations!

If the iPad is taken into account, Apple is the world's 3rd largest maker of portable computers

via Digital Stats by noreply@blogger.com (Dan) on 8/6/10

"Starting with IDC's global portable computing market share survey for the June 2010 quarter, he has redrawn Apple's (AAPL) share, adding the 3.27 million iPads the company sold in the quarter to its 2.47 million MacBooks and MacBook Pros.
"When including the iPad as part of the NB [notebook] market," [Deutsche Bank's Chris Whitmore] writes, "Apple leapt over Asus, Lenovo, Toshiba and Dell in terms of global unit share."
Viewed this way, Apple goes from being No. 7 in the worldwide portable computer market to No. 3, after only Hewlett Packard (HPQ) and Acer. And it's not stopping there, says Whitmore."
Source:  CNN Money, 2nd August 2010

Keeping Your Customers Starts with Understanding Them!

Here's a take on the reason to seek customer feedback... It's at the heart of developing customer retention strategies http://j.mp/b0g7sL

Will the satisfaction questionnaire soon be extinct?

Will the satisfaction questionnaire soon  be extent?

Check this out...

A penny for your thoughts

Market Research Deathwatch

Tan Le's wireless neuro headset is cheap, easy to use, and doesn't look like a torture device. Her company (Emotiv) also claims to have developed software that can 'unfold' cortical differences between individuals, vastly improving the accuracy of signal source mapping. We're talking about a commodity priced neuro interface that plugs into your USB port. EEG meets wireless mouse.

An optimist would look at this and say the golden age of neuro research is nigh. Not so fast. Someone still needs to develop software that can reliably translate EEG signals into research results; that kind of development requires ubernerds and we don't have any... but market forces will eventually birth a competent, if uninspired, solution. Then we will have to convince ordinary people to let us read their minds; that's where we will fail. Why? Because we won't put any effort into creating a positive and meaningful experience for participants.

Picking Blueberries and the Customer Satisfaction Survey

Picking fresh blueberries in Vermont has to be one of the highlights of our short summer season.

There's nothing quite like pulling a handful of berries from the bush and feeling no qualms about popping them straight into your mouth! There will always be more for the bucket!

But on our last outing, I got to thinking that client satisfaction surveys have some similarities to picking blueberries. Consider this. At least half the benefit of picking those blueberries comes from the very act itself. From taking part in the overall experience.

In addition to the berries themselves, you get the benefits of exercising on a beautiful sunny day, breathing lots of fresh air and taking in the natural surroundings. And with each berry you select, you have a tidbit perfectly endowed with everything need to make you smile!

So too, with a client satisfaction survey.

The very act of seeking out clients' opinions, and listening to them, yields untold benefits. Not just with the distilled data afterward, but along the way as well.

Often, as I conduct surveys, respondents let me know how much they appreciate that someone is taking the time and trouble to ask for feedback.

And here's another similarity... the more you pick, the better!

Same is true for listening to clients. No matter how you try, you can't get to speak with each of those clients. You don't have to worry about exhausting the supply. Just make sure you do design the satisfaction questionnaire to allow for as broad a range of opinions as possible.

Which brings me to a third similarity. Sometimes the sweetest berries lie hidden behind an imperfect appearance. While it's tempting to go for the perfectly round shapes with their abundant juice, sometimes a slightly wrinkled fruit will turn out to hold even more concentrated sweetness.

That's the way it is with client feedback. What appears to be a complaint, may hold the most valuable feedback you'll receive. When a client takes time to let you know how to improve, consider it an exquisite moment. A rare gem. Often, we overlook the secrets that could propel our business to the next level, precisely because they're hidden in an outer form that's less appealing than the standard 'Great Work' comments.

Last, but not least, I realized that picking those berries filled me with an enormous sense of gratitude. Taking time to ask your clients for their feedback should do the same for you. Without clients, there would be no business!