What Customer Satisfaction Surveys Can Tell You about the Health of Your Company

Customer satisfaction is the key to a company’s success. Satisfied customers place larger and more frequent orders, while unsatisfied customers rarely return to place additional orders if they can find another source. Understanding which aspects of your product, brand, and business processes contribute to customer satisfaction and which erode customer loyalty can help you become more profitable. Customer satisfaction surveys are a great way to gain actionable insight through the eyes of your customers.

Customer satisfaction often hinges on little details that may escape your attention without the insight you gain from customer satisfaction surveys. For example, customers may find your eCommerce site difficult to navigate or the checkout process might be seen as too complex. Customers may not appreciate requests for personal information in order to browse your website or to gain access to product details.

In physical retail locations, customers might find merchandise displays are confusing or unappealing. Perhaps the number of people on the selling floor is inadequate or the people there don’t have the knowledge to answer detailed product questions. It’s possible that your Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system is a turnoff to customers who want to phone in orders, or your phone order process is too cumbersome and time consuming. The point is there are hundreds of ways that your processes can cause dissatisfaction, and without customer satisfaction surveys, you may not be aware of them.

If customers complain that it is hard to get product information, for example, many companies will rush to train employees or put more info on their websites. Sometimes this may resolve the problem, but what the customer may actually be telling you is that your product packaging is too hard to read or that your employees cluster in intimidating groups on the selling floor, rather than offering to help browsing customers. Acting on customer satisfaction survey insights will allocate your resources toward activities that build your business, rather than to irrelevant activities that will not move the revenue needle.

Understanding exactly what your customers are telling you requires a properly designed survey, interpretation, and analysis by trained professionals.

The benefit of investing in effective customer satisfaction surveys is an increase in customer satisfaction that enables you to build a solid base of happy loyal customers who place more orders and recommend your product or service to others.

NBRI helps organizations just like yours by combining powerful research with deep analytics. If you’re ready to join their ranks, here’s how we can help: