Measuring customer satisfaction and customer loyalty

The confirmatory survey can be used if the company needs to conclusively confirm or refute a hypothesis. Maybe you have a gut feeling about how customers perceive a specific service in your business – and you would like to have these ideas and feelings confirmed with data before you invest further in optimizing and developing the service. 

The purpose of the exploratory survey is to make us more knowledgeable and broaden our horizons. It can be used if you want to discover new business opportunities or trends. Often the questions will be about the customer's future needs in relation to the company's services and products. 

We see the same tendency from the government, most recently in the Reform Commission's new recommendations for Job Centers, which call for greater citizen involvement and more interdisciplinary collaboration. 

Once you have decided whether the survey should be confirmatory or exploratory in nature, or possibly a mixture of the two, you must determine the time perspective of the study. 
 
Do you want to have an annual Customer Satisfaction Survey or an event-specific Customer Satisfaction Survey? 

In the following section you can read about their respective advantages. 

customers. The questionnaire can deal with overall themes such as strategy, image, customer service, prices and products. 

• Advantages: All your customers can participate. The annual Customer Satisfaction Survey provides an overall picture of customer satisfaction, which can be used for strategic work and to establish stable benchmarks over time. 
   
• Disadvantages: The responses are just a snapshot that will become less and less clear as time passes. 

The event-specific Customer Satisfaction Survey is sent out when the customer has been in touch with one or more of your touch points. 

If a bank is sending out the questionnaire, the customer could be asked, among other things: 
 
”How did you feel about the advice you got from X [name of bank advisor]”. 

• Advantages: You are foremost in the customer’s thoughts when you ask the customer the questions, which gives a current and true picture of the customer’s satisfaction. If the answers are critical, you can immediately correct the customer’s bad experience. 
   
• Disadvantages: It can be more resource-intensive, as the company has to deal with new figures on an ongoing basis as they come in. However, this can be avoided by implementing fully automated solutions. 

NPS is a score that uncovers the customers' willingness to recommend the company to others.  

f your biggest wish for the survey is to know how loyal your customers really are, you should measure your Net Promoter Score.  
 
Below, you can read what an NPS survey can contribute to and what you should keep in mind when working with a NPS. 

When you come across the question ”How likely are you to recommend us to others?” this indicates a company that would like to know its Net Promoter Score. The method behind Net Promoter Score (NPS) is simple to implement, analyze and act on. NPS can predict what customers will do in the future because you ask the simple question ”How likely are you to recommend us to others?”. 

Compared to the standard customer satisfaction score, where you ask the customer to tell you about his or her past experience with the company, in an NPS, you ask the customer to say if he/she will come back. Therefore, the difference between loyalty and satisfaction is that satisfaction is something that relates to the past, while loyalty testifies to the customer’s expected future behavior. 

In an NPS, the customer will have the opportunity to respond from 0 (not at all) to 10 (very likely). If the customer responds to the first question with a score of 9-10, the customer is a true loyal customer, also called a promoter. 7-8 is regarded as a passive satisfied customer, as the customer probably does not have a strong bond with you and therefore will not unsolicited recommend you to others. If the customer chooses 0-6, the customer is considered non-loyal and is therefore called a detractor. The NPS score is obtained by subtracting the percentage of detractors (0-6) from promoters (9-10).  
 
You can see an example below. 

IF THERE ARE 60 PERCENT PROMOTERS AND 20 PERCENT DETRACTORS, THE EQUATION WILL BE: 60-20=40. THE NPS LANDS IN THIS CASE ON 40. 

NPS takes the customer's temperature, but does not tell anything about the underlying reasons. Several companies therefore choose to start the questionnaire with 5-10 questions, which are followed by the NPS question. In this way, you can see how a critic has answered the questions that led up to the NPS question. You may find out that the customer has been unhappy with Customer Service – and by knowing this weak point in your business, you get an incentive to optimize right here. 

Kundeansvarlig, Medlemsorganisationer

Xact By Rambøll

M +45 51 61 78 82

pemj@ramboll.com 

LinkedIn