Measuring customer satisfaction is an integral building block for any organisation wanting to leverage the knowledge gained from customer insight programmes.

Depending on your end goal, survey research can help your organisation to gather and understand information surrounding your customers, employees and key stakeholder groups in order to design relevant and effective processes, technology, management structures and programmes centred on the needs of group being studied.

Customer satisfaction surveys are an often overlooked tool organisations can use to uncover the insight they need to visualise, measure and improve the intangible factors that are associated with influencing customer satisfaction delivered by an organisation.

Moreover, one of the biggest benefits associated with running a customer satisfaction programme is that it can give your organisation reliable, accurate and actionable statistics to show to directors, managers and decision makers to measure how your organisation performs on satisfying your customers.  More importantly however, it identify areas that you are performing well at and help you shape training programmes to create a winning culture of success across customer interactions and touch points.

For example, in a call centre, you may want to measure the customer service request rate along with the call resolution rate identify how your agents are performing over time and reward your best employees appropriately.  On the other hand, in public sector organisations, you may want to measure local crime rates and measure how the public perceive the resolution of these issues.

It’s all about the Detail…

“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know, we also know there are known unknowns”

Originally said by Donald Rumsfeld from a Press Conference at NATO Headquarters, Brussels, Belgium, June 6, 2002, this statement couldn’t be better to sum up the benefits that market research brings organisations.

From a top level, market research helps organisations gain the insight to allow managers and decision makers alike to reduce the associated risks in making difficult strategic decisions to make the organisation grow and to be closer aligned to meet your customers need of your existing or new products or services.

For customer centric organisations, the market research process is an intergral part in knowing opinions and thoughts on a product… but to delve in further, it can help managers and decision makers make decisions on how best to optimise their new products they are taking to market as well as shape the product concept, price point and identify communication channels which are best utilised to reach your customer groups.

In a nutshell, the role of market research helps solve the problem of bringing the voice of the customer into an organisation and and create and develop an up-to-date and relelvant portfoloio of products and services aligned to an identified set of customers wants, needs and preferences.

Applying a customer-centric philosophy throughout your organisation allows customers the opportunity to voice their opinions directly to an organisation so that their views are taken in account allowing a healthy amount of two way communication flow between your key customer groups and your organisation.  Interestingly, an in-direct benefit to this is the associated PR and Word or Mouth awareness you can build with your customer groups at the same time as your market research programmes.

“Loyalty is one of the great engines of business success.”
Frederick F. Reicheld, author of The Loyalty Effect

Customer economics are changing. With one of the deepest recessions to hit the business landscape since the Second World War, it is now more important than ever that organisations keep their ear to ground, listening to what their customers really think and configuring organisational resources to best serve the needs of their customers.

The focus on customer experience in 2010 has grown exponentially throughout the year (see back issue) and although there are some schools of thought that say the bubble will burst in 2011, it is important not to overlook that there are some valuable lessons and ideas that your organisation can benefit from and put into practice to serve your customers better and retain them for longer.