Why is customer satisfaction extremely important?

Customer satisfaction is a marketing term used to describe our liking of a company’s products or services. It is important because:

1. It is the best indicator of how likely a customer will make a purchase in the future. Asking customers to rate their satisfaction on a scale of 1-10 is a good way to see if they will become your repeat customers or even advocates.
2. It will be seen as a key differentiator, in a competitive marketplace where businesses compete for customers. Businesses who succeed in these cut-throat environments are the ones that make customer satisfaction a key element of their business strategy.
3. As per the study by InfoQuest, ‘totally satisfied customer’ contributes 2.6 times more revenue than a ‘somewhat satisfied customer’. Furthermore, a ‘totally satisfied customer’ contributes 14 times more revenue than a ‘somewhat dissatisfied customer’.
4. It’s cheaper to retain customers than acquire new ones. In fact, it costs six to seven times more to acquire new customers than it does to retain existing customers.
5. As per McKinsey, an unhappy customer will always tell his bad experience to 9-15 people. In fact, 13% of unhappy customers tell over 20 people about their experience
6. As per the Accenture global customer satisfaction report (2008), price is not the main reason for customer churn; but it is actually due to the overall poor quality of customer service

How can you measure YOUR customer’s satisfaction?

Management of customers’ satisfaction efficiently is one the biggest challenge that an organization face. The tools or methods to measure customer satisfaction needs to be defined clearly to fulfill the desired norms. Below are the following methods to measure customer satisfaction:

Direct Methods of measurement:

Directly contacting customers and getting their valuable feedback is very important. Following are some of the ways by which customers could be directly contacted:

1. Getting customer feedback by deploying it to third party agencies. Organizations mostly employ external agencies to listen to their customers and provide dedicated feedback to them. This is desirable as the external agencies will give unbiased reports. These feedbacks needs to be in structured format so that conclusive results could be the key results
2. Direct marketing channels, in-house call centers, complaint handling department could be treated as first point of contact for getting customer feedback. These feedbacks are compiled to analyze customers’ perception.
3. Getting customer feedback by face to face meeting. This engages immediate issues.
4. Feedback through complaint or appreciation letter. This also engages immediate issues. However, in face to face meeting & complaint or appreciation letter, the feedback received is not in uniform format as different types of customers are addressed with different domains of questions. This will hinder the analysis process to be performed accurately and consistently.
5. Direct customer feedback through surveys and questionnaires- It consists of uniformed questionnaire to get customer feedback from well segmented customers. The design of the prepared questionnaire is an important aspect and should encompass all the essential factors of business. The questions asked should be in a way that the customer is encouraged to respond in an obvious way/. Such feedbacks received by the organizations can be treated as one of the best way to measure customer satisfaction.
6. Surprise market visit – By doing surprise visits, information regarding different segment of products and services provided to the customers could be obtained in an efficient manner. This will help supplier to know the weak and strong aspects of products and services.

Indirect Methods of Measurement:

1. The major disadvantage of using direct methods is that it turns out to be very costly and requires a lot of pre compiled preparations to implement. For getting the valuable feedbacks, the supplier totally depends on the customer due to which they loses options and chances to take corrective measure at correct time.  This is a reactive approach to measure customer satisfaction. Hence there are other following indirect methods of getting feedback regarding customer satisfaction:
2. Measuring customer satisfaction by the complaints: Customer’s complaints are the issues and problems that are reported by the customer to supplier with regards to the usage of any specific product or related service. These complaints can be classified under different segments according to the severity and department. If the complaints under a particular segment go high in a specific period of time then the performance of the organization is degrading in that specific area or segment. But if the complaints are decreasing in a specific period of time then that means the organization is performing well and customer satisfaction level is also higher.
3. Customer Loyalty:  A customer is said to be loyal if he revisits supplier on regular basis for purchases. These loyal customers are the satisfied ones and hence they are bounded with a relationship with the supplier. Hence by obtaining the customer loyalty index, suppliers can indirectly measure customer satisfaction.

Why you should choose IsparkIndia as your partner for doing customer satisfaction survey?

1.  Well experienced in conducting scientific research for many organizations, including Fortune 500 companies
2. Capability to design customized survey, JUST FOR YOU
3. Having software capability to manage the systems – making the systems, reports, and data available to the people that need them to make strategic decisions and achieve strategic results
4. Detailed custom reports
5. Results presentations delivered by consultants
6. Capability to perform surveys through call center or face to face or surprise visits PAN India

CUSTOMER SATISFACTION   CUSTOMER SATISFACTION SURVEY       CUSTOMER FEEDBACK       iSPARKIndia