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Would your employee satisfaction questionnaire yield similar results? From Fast Company...
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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

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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