Customer satisfaction surveys are arguably the most common type of market research undertaken by brands, products, and service providers. This makes perfect sense given that customers are the most important asset for any business and are critical for business sustainability and success.
In line with the foregoing, and as market research consultants, a message that we constantly communicate to current and potential business clients is the importance of tracking customer experience on a regular basis. One morning, it dawned on us that we were a business too and yet we had not conducted a formal customer experience study in the 5 years of our existence. Surely, we had to practice what we preached! Admittedly, we did have a good sense of what our clients felt about our services through various solicited and unsolicited feedback, but we still needed to get feedback in a more systematic and inclusive manner. Thus, in October 2020, we invited previous clients to complete an online survey to rate our services.
A total of 30 clients who had used our services in their individual capacity (i.e. as opposed to organisational representatives) completed the survey which had only three questions as below:
1) - How did you get to know about our services?
One of the most reliable indicators of service quality and customer satisfaction is when clients who have received a service go on to recommend the same service provider to others. It is therefore pleasing that as much as 60% of the clients who completed the survey had been referred to us by previous clients. The other 40% had found information about us on the Internet.
2) - How satisfied or dissatisfied were you with our services?
Almost all (97%) of the clients were satisfied with the service they had received from us. Notably, this included 2 in 3 clients (67%) who were “extremely satisfied”. Altogether, none of the 30 clients in the survey expressed any level of dissatisfaction with our services.
3) - How likely are you to recommend our services to others?
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer loyalty by asking customers how likely they are to recommend a brand or service to others. The NPS is the percentage of customers who, on scale of 0 to 10, rate their likelihood to recommend a brand or service to a friend or colleague as 9 or 10 (i.e. promoters) minus the percentage rating this at 6 or below (i.e. detractors). Customers who give a rating score of 7 or 8 are referred to as “passives”. The NPS correlates highly to customer satisfaction and customer loyalty and has also been shown to correlate with revenue growth relative to competitors. As a general guideline, an NPS of between 0 and 30 is good, 30 to 70 is excellent and 70 to 100 is simply amazing. As shown below, our NPS from the survey was indicated at 63 and is quite pleasing. This score is indeed consistent with the earlier reported prevalence of positive word-of-mouth referrals by our clients.
Conclusion
Although a cross-sectional design such as the one we used in this survey does yield valid results, it is largely retrospective. For example, some of the clients in the survey had last received a service from us 4 years prior to the survey and, as such, their feedback was susceptible to time lapse biasing factors. We therefore decided not to close the survey whose results are reported above but to convert it into an ongoing real-time customer feedback system. Through this system, we are sending new and repeat clients a digital link on which they get to rate our services immediately after a service interaction. Among the advantages of real-time client satisfaction measurement is that we get the opportunity to correct any shortcomings before we get to serve the next client and thus improve our clients’ overall service experience.
You can check real-time feedback results from our clients here.