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.