Do you know that customers satisfied with your service won’t necessarily return to you? The correlation between customer satisfaction and loyalty is not as straightforward as it may seem.
Satisfaction surveys are a standard procedure often seen as the indicator of customer relation with the brand or product. Indeed, customer satisfaction is a foundation of effective marketing, however, it does not provide the full picture. Satisfaction surveys won’t always work if we’re trying to identify the factors hampering sales or growth.
Satisfaction doesn’t automatically translate into loyalty.
There are situations in which the client is satisfied – the product or service corresponds with his needs or he found a solution to his problem – but despite that, he is not going to recommend the company to others. Why? Perhaps the service wasn’t pleasant enough, it took too much time to find the product on the website or he encountered difficulties while completing the transaction. There are plenty of possible reasons resulting with the same effect – a satisfied customer, who, most likely, shall not return. Plus, positive customer satisfaction survey results, which do not correspond with sales growth results.
How to prevent this situation?
Adding extra clarifying questions to the survey seems like the easiest way. However, the more questions you include, the more discouraged your respondents are, and the lower survey completion rates you get. Also, you may end up in a situation where you will be not so sure, if the additional questions are the right ones.
Is there a better solution?
According to Fred Reichheld, the remedy is called Net Promoter Score (NPS) – a type of survey, in which customers are asked a single question:
How likely is it that you would recommend our company / service to a friend or colleague?
This is a very simple, yet effective question based on the less is more attitude. The NPS indicator is clear and universal, which makes it comprehensible and meaningful across departments and various organization levels. No wonder most leading companies use it.
It pays to complement, or maybe even replace, standard satisfaction surveys with Net Promoter Score (NPS) methodology. You can do it easily by applying the specially designed NPS question type provided by surveylab.com, which automatically groups the answers and calculates your Net Promoter Score.
If you’d like to find out more about the NPS theory and methodology, we highly recommend the book The Ultimate Question 2.0 by Fred Reichheld, the creator of NPS.