Editor's note: Paul Hague is founder of B2B International, a Manchester, U.K., research company. He can be reached at paulh@b2binternational.com. This article appeared in the November 28, 2011, edition of Quirk's e-newsletter. 

 

In a small company it is very evident if customers are dissatisfied - people complain directly to the proprietor. In a large company, however, there are multiple touchpoints for any single customer that could cause dissatisfaction: the sales representatives, the customer service team, the delivery people, the finance department and so on. Company managers may have hundreds of customers around the world and the only way they can know for sure how satisfied they are is by carrying out a survey. This brings with it a number of potential problems and the survey itself is the least of these. Measuring customer satisfaction is easy compared to the task of implementing improvements. In my experience, too many customer satisfaction studies gather dust because there is no mechanism for turning the market research findings into tangible improvements. I'd like to discuss what customer satisfaction scores mean and offer a four-point plan for making improvements.

 

 

Most customer satisfaction surveys use numerical scales to measure levels of satisfaction. Respondents are asked to provide a score on their satisfaction with a supplier using a scale that runs from 1 (or 0) to 10, where 1 indicates total dissatisfaction and 10 is equal to total satisfaction. Ninety percent of all companies measuring their customer satisfaction achieve average scores in the range of 7 to 9. These scores between 7 and 9 are known as the corridor of satisfaction. On the 10-point scale in Figure 1, 8 is in practice the midpoint, not 5. This makes sense if you think about it. If you gave your dentist a satisfaction score of 5 out of 10, you almost certainly would be looking for a new one. We only do...