Customer satisfaction research is one of the most common modes of research that businesses do.  Much of our clientele here at RMS in Syracuse consists of studies related to customer satisfaction surveys – whether it is HCAHPS®, HH-CAHPS®, student satisfaction, or even longitudinal follow-up surveys with customers who had a recent experience with one of our clients.  Even surveys not branded as customer satisfaction usually include at least one question in the script, which asks the respondent about overall satisfaction or approval with a product or service.

With all of this customer satisfaction survey data, RMS provides a lot of measurements/benchmarks and recommendations for our clients.  Our team runs analysis on predictors of overall satisfaction, which quality measures have the greatest impact on overall satisfaction and even trending data over time – month to month, year to year, etc.  Our clients use this data to track the voice of their customers and use our recommendations to make the necessary improvements to further drive satisfaction.  Simply put, customer satisfaction research is necessary market research to keep the pulse of your customers.  It must be done to ensure continued success.

But some of the most important value in customer satisfaction research is the survey tool you are using in itself.  Yes, the actual survey instrument.  Asking your customers for feedback on you lets them know “you’re listening.”  Too often customers feel they do not have a good avenue to voice their opinion on a product or service.  It’s a win-win situation for the company – you either:

1. Collect feedback from a satisfied customer that reminisces on that good experience with your service or product; or
2. Collect feedback from a dissatisfied customer, listen to their issues, find out why they are dissatisfied and make improvements based on their criticism.  The key is to make improvements from the criticism – nothing will further tarnish a customer relationship than a company than listens but doesn’t act.  If you make changes, the dissatisfied customer will notice if they use your product/service again.  Vance wrote a post about this about a month ago re: Domino’s Pizza – click here to read it!

Asking for feedback won’t make a single customer relationship worse off.  So the next time your company is thinking about doing a customer satisfaction study, don’t lose sight of the process and the survey in itself, in addition to the in-depth analysis and recommendations RMS makes to improve your customer relationships.