Measure the satisfaction of your team / clients / partners with our expert services.

Assess your customers satisfaction!

As we have noticed over the time, a study of satisfaction itself will increase the level of satisfaction of your clients. There is always room for improvements, and by doing this kind of study, you send the message that you are willing to become better, for your clients.

What Is A Satisfaction Study?

In order to better understand what is a satisfaction study, we should start by defining customers satisfaction:

“A term used in marketing to measure the way in which the products or services of an organisation meet or exceed customers expectations.”

The customers satisfaction is important because it gives managers and marketers an instrument that can be used to manage and improve the business.

Why it is recommended to do a Satisfaction Study?

Actual feedback. The information obtained after a satisfaction study gives valuable feedback to the organisation, regarding important aspects for its clients. Satisfaction studies are extremely important and they must be correctly designed in order to give an objective perspective about the real aspects that need improvements. Customer’s feedback can reveal problems that you weren’t aware of, giving you the opportunity to fix them.

Gathering information. A satisfaction study gives you a channel through you can collect customer’s feedback in a organised manner. Today, many clients are sharing their opinions on social media – a space that is totally out of your control. By asking them what they think about your products and services, you give the customers the message that you are ready to listen to them and to take in consideration their opinions, and furthermore, their feedback is collected in a organised way by your company.

A new understanding. By sharing the results of the study with your employees, you will build a new understanding of the operation, based on client’s perspective. This will give a larger vision to the employees from departments that are not directly connected with the clients. They may have the impression that their work doesn’t directly affect customer’s satisfaction. By including questions regarding the activities (like bills accuracy, order processing and others) you will be able to enhance the importance of these procedures for your clients and you will be able to determine a general attitude focused on the client.

Identifying internal problems. Responses analysis will reveal the organisation’s strengths and weaknesses, from your customer’s perspective. In this way, you will be able to concentrate easily on the parts that need improvements, in order to fix potential problems. If the study will reveal problems in areas like order processing or the phone answering time, you could increase the performance by introducing automation, for example. Responses that show problems in the employees attitude, can be resolved with training sessions.

Retention. The customer’s satisfaction level has a real impact on the ability to maintain clients. If the study shows a low level of satisfaction regarding many analysed aspects, you can lose your clients in favor of competitors. A recommended instrument for measuring the level of customers satisfaction and loyalty is  Net Promoter Score, that will show you how many of your clients are loyal (Promoters), indifferent (Passive) or unsatisfied (Detractors).

Progress. Only one satisfaction study is needed to give you an image on customer’s point of view, in a certain moment of time. However, by conducting many  satisfaction studies over a longer period of time, you can measure the results of the programs you have implemented. To do this, it’s preferable to repeat a part of the questions already asked, in order to make a comparison between the same indicators.

Show that you care. Customers like to be asked an opinion. This thing gives them the feeling of appreciation from your company, which is determined to keep them long term clients and bases their business decisions on their opinion,

The disadvantages of satisfaction studies

Many studies, little time. Your customers are annoyed with too many surveys and marketing materials. Even though they are easy to complete, some people don’t like to do it or they just don’t have the time to. Thereby, sending surveys too often can irritate your clients and can lead to slow rates of answering or a low satisfaction score.

We at MKOR, make every study as easily as possible to complete, but we also collect relevant data. For relevant responses rates, we make sure that the samples we use are large enough, in order to obtain the desired number of responses, while respecting the customer’s option to not participate. We recommend to repeat the satisfaction study once every 6 months, not more often.

Data confidentiality. Your clients are flooded with spam, e-mail and telephone solicitations. When you make a survey (online or by telephone), it is difficult for your clients to believe they are not being monitored.

We at MKOR, assure our respondents that their data will only be used for statistical purposes, and their contact details are required only for precise goals (coupons submission, study results, if they are public). Respondents and clients confidentiality is extremely important, thereby we respect their right to privacy. By signing a confidentiality agreement, and by restricting the access of employees and partners to data, we make sure that we have the complete control over the information all the time.

How to measure your clients satisfaction?

There are two main ways to obtain customers feedback:

Direct Methods

• Obtain clients feedback with the help of a research agency;
• Direct marketing, call centre, public relation department;
• Meetings and face to face discussions;
• Letters of appreciation or complaint;
• Feedback for online or face to face questionnaires;

Besides these, there is another very popular direct method, surprise visits in the store. With these, the information about products and services can be obtained in a efficient way. In this way, the company’s management department will have fresh information about the strengths and weaknesses of every employee that interacts with your clients. These visits performed by a person employed to analysis the interaction with clients, are also called  mystery shopper, and starting to be increasingly used in our country, too.

Indirect methods

• Customers complaints. These are problems that clients report to their supplier of products or services, regarding different aspects of the interaction with your organisation. As you know, you can expect complaints when clients approach you for feedback, the positive experiences being rarely mentioned. So, don’t be disappointed!, these kind of feedback doesn’t mean you have low quality services or products, it only means that there is a generalised tendency to express dissatisfaction, rather than satisfaction.
• Loyalty programs. It is necessary and advised to communicate periodically with your customers, in order to increase their level of satisfaction. In this way, you will build a relationship with them, which will determine them to come back for new purchases. You can read more about loyalty programs, here (romanian).

Who Should Be Interviewed?

Some products and services are chosen and used by people who don’t have as much power to influence as others. For example, for a cigarette brand, the choice is simple and personal, and it’s clear who you should choose to interview.

But in the case of a cereal brand, who should be interviewed in order to determine satisfaction? The person who buys the cereals (usually a parent) or the person who consumes them (usually a child)? Not to mention the complicated decisions in business-to-business transactions.

Who should be targeted in a satisfaction study for a truck manufacturer: the driver, the logistics manager, or the general manager of the company? In other business transactions, decisions can be influenced by people from other departments, the more technical ones: production, purchases, quality or research. Keeping in mind that every department evaluates the suppliers on different scales, client satisfaction programs will need to cover multiple perspectives.

A well known truth in market research is the need to ask the right person the right question. Finding this person in a satisfaction study may need a compromise, by interviewing one single person – a key decision factor; this person can be the logistics manager in the above example of the truck manufacturer. If the budget and time allow it, more people can be interviewed, which may involve many research methods, as well as different questions.

A loyal customer represents the standard choice for measuring clients satisfaction. However, clients who influence product’s appearance on the market, are often ignored. For example, if the products are sold by an intermediate. A good satisfaction study will include representatives from each stage of the value chain, for example, distributors, along with final users.

Usually, customers satisfaction studies are exactly what their name says – customers study, without taking in consideration old clients. These category is a good source for stories regarding the problems of the services offered, while potential clients are a resource for reference  data about the competitors. If a satisfaction study will aim the non-clients, choosing the sample will be much harder. The quality of the samples influence the quality of the study more than anything else, especially since they are beyond the control of researchers (as opposed to the design and the interpretation of questionnaire data).

When the study’s results are ready, they should be presented to the same group of people involved from the start. Workshops are a great way of analysing the study’s results and to set the steps that need to be taken at internal level. This is the step in which the information transfer is very important  – from data gathered and interpreted by researchers, to facts that people in the company find useful in order to implement changes.

As far as the satisfaction surveys are concerned, they should be repeated constantly, because the changes at internal level will have an impact on customers satisfaction – as an endless race.

At MKOR, we devote our every effort to increase our customers business. This is achieved with the help of satisfaction surveys too, which we consider to be one of the most important research tools  that a company can use.