How to do the best customer satisfaction survey

The process of measuring customer satisfaction is customer satisfaction survey. It can find out the key factors directly related to customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction (reflected by statistical indicators, sometimes called performance indicators), measure statistical data according to customers' views on these factors, and then get comprehensive customer satisfaction indicators. It is also the fastest growing and most widely used survey technology in the market research industry in recent years.

The core of the survey is to determine the degree to which products and services meet customers' wishes and needs. As far as its research objectives are concerned, it should achieve the following five objectives:

1 to determine the key performance factors that lead to customer satisfaction;

2. Evaluate the satisfaction index of the company and the satisfaction index of major competitors;

3. Judge priorities and take correct actions;

4. Control the whole process;

5. Product upgrade and product upgrade.

Customer satisfaction survey method

Establish a complaint and suggestion system

Customer-centered enterprises should be able to facilitate customers to convey their suggestions and complaints, and the establishment of complaints and suggestions system can collect customers' opinions and suggestions. For example, many restaurants and hotels provide their guests with forms to reflect their opinions. The hospital can set up a suggestion box in the aisle to provide advice cards for inpatients and hire a patient to collect patients' opinions. Some customer-centric enterprises, such as Procter & Gamble, Panasonic, Sharp, etc. , a toll-free telephone called "Customer Hotline" has been set up to facilitate customers' consultation, suggestions or complaints to the maximum extent. These information flows help enterprises solve problems faster and provide them with many ideas for developing new products. For example, 3M claims that two-thirds of its product improvement ideas come from customers' opinions.

Customer satisfaction scale survey

As an enterprise, don't think that you can fully understand customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction by establishing a complaint and suggestion system. A survey of a shopping center in Singapore shows that when customers are dissatisfied with inferior service, they will have the following reactions: 70% shoppers will buy elsewhere; 39% people think that complaints are too troublesome; 24% people will tell others not to shop in shops that provide inferior services; 17% of people will write to complain about poor service; 9% will blame the salesperson for poor service. The above results show that not all dissatisfied customers will complain. Therefore, enterprises can not measure the degree of customer satisfaction by the degree of complaints, but should obtain the direct measurement index of customer satisfaction through regular surveys.

Enterprises can ask buyers' satisfaction by phone or letter. In these tests to ask about customer satisfaction, questionnaires or test scales are generally designed from the following two aspects: first, list all factors that may affect customer satisfaction, then rank them from the most important to the least important, and finally select several factors that enterprises are most concerned about to help respondents judge the importance of these factors; Respondents are required to evaluate the satisfaction of the selected important factors to be evaluated. Generally speaking, it is highly satisfied, generally satisfied, no opinion, partially dissatisfied and extremely dissatisfied. This is the main way to find customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction, and enterprises will use this information to improve their next stage of work.

Fake shopping method

Another effective way to understand customer satisfaction is to hire some people to pretend to be potential buyers and report their strengths and weaknesses in the process of buying products from enterprises and competitors. These people who pretend to shop can even deliberately make trouble to see if the sales staff of the enterprise can handle things well. Enterprises should not only hire pretend shoppers, but also managers themselves should leave the office from time to time, travel incognito, engage in shopping activities among enterprises and competitors, and experience the experience of being treated as customers. For managers, there is another unusual way: to call their own enterprises as customers to raise various problems and complaints, and see how the employees of the enterprises deal with these problems. For example, Taikang Insurance Company often calls customers to ask whether their staff have made persuasive sales to customers or signed on their behalf.

Lost customer analysis

Enterprises should contact customers who stop buying or switch to other suppliers to understand why this happens. Every time IBM loses a customer, it will try its best to discuss and analyze the reasons for the failure: whether the price is too high, the service is defective, or the product is unreliable. It is very important to conduct a "turnover survey" and control the "customer turnover rate". Because the customer churn rate is rising, it shows that enterprises are not satisfied with customers.

In the final analysis, the above customer satisfaction survey method is to collect relevant information. Therefore, enterprises must spend money and carefully design their own information systems. Generally speaking, there are two channels to obtain information: formal channels are mainly open and procedural channels, such as customer complaint system and customer satisfaction survey. Informal information channels are non-public and hidden information channels, such as pretending to shop, visiting incognito, arranging "eyeliner" and "undercover" among customers. The advantage of formal information channels is procedural, but the disadvantage is too slow. In addition, due to face, emotions and other factors, customers are somewhat dissatisfied and inconvenient to express. The advantage of informal channels is that they can quickly obtain the most confidential information from customers, and the disadvantage is that they are non-procedural and tend to summarize the opinions of individual customers. Marketing managers should flexibly control these two channels and make up for the lack of formal channels with informal channels.

Customer satisfaction survey process

Determine the content of the investigation

To carry out customer satisfaction survey, we must first identify customers and their demand structure, and make clear the content of customer satisfaction survey. Different enterprises, different products have different customers. Different customer groups have different emphasis on their demand structure, for example, some focus on price, some focus on service, and some focus on performance and function. Generally speaking, the contents of the investigation mainly include the following aspects: the internal quality of the product, including the technical performance, reliability, maintainability and safety of the product; Product functional requirements, including use function and auxiliary function (comfort, etc.). ); Product service requirements, including pre-sales and after-sales service requirements. Product extension requirements, including spare parts supply, product introduction materials, training support, etc. Product appearance, packaging and protection requirements; Product price demand, etc.

Quantitative weighted customer satisfaction index

The essence of customer satisfaction survey is a process of quantitative analysis, that is, numbers reflect customers' attitudes towards the attributes of the tested objects, so it is necessary to quantify the survey items. Customer satisfaction survey is to understand the attitude of customers to products, services or enterprises, that is, to meet the state level. Generally, seven grades of attitudes are adopted: very satisfied, satisfied, relatively satisfied, average, dissatisfied, dissatisfied and very dissatisfied, and the corresponding values are 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Generally speaking, satisfaction means that the product or service completely meets or even exceeds the customer's expectations, and the customer is very excited and satisfied; Satisfaction means that all aspects of products or services basically meet the expectations of customers, and customers are satisfied; Satisfaction means that many aspects of products or services meet the expectations of customers, and customers have a good impression and affirmation; Generally speaking, products or services meet the minimum expectations of customers, and customers have no obvious bad mood; Dissatisfaction means that the product or service does not meet the main expectations of customers, and customers complain and regret; Dissatisfaction means that some aspects of the product or service are defective, and customers feel angry and annoyed; Dissatisfaction means that there are major defects in products or services, and customers are indignant and angry.

For different products and services, the same index has different effects on customer satisfaction. For example, after-sales service is a very important factor for durable consumer goods industry, but the opposite is true for fast-moving consumer goods industry. Therefore, the weight of the same index in different index systems is completely different, and only by giving different factors appropriate weight can customer satisfaction be objectively and truly reflected. The author suggests using Delphi method to determine the weight, inviting a certain number of relevant experts to weigh each item of the survey separately, and asking them to send their respective weight results to the investigator, who will return the comprehensive results to the experts, who will use this information to make a new round of weight, and so on for several times until a stable weight result is obtained (1 ~ 3). Finally, the calculation formula of each customer satisfaction index score result is: score = weighted score value.

Clarify the investigation method

At present, there are three common methods:

(1) questionnaire survey. This is one of the most commonly used methods to collect customer satisfaction data. There are many questions in the questionnaire, and the respondents need to choose the corresponding answer according to the preset table. Customers should evaluate the service quality, customer service work and customer satisfaction level of enterprises from their own interests. At the same time, it also allows respondents to answer questions in an open way, so that they can master their ideas in more detail.

(2) Second-hand data collection. Second-hand materials are mostly obtained through public publications, networks and investigation companies. The details and usefulness of the materials may be flawed, but they can be used as an important reference before our in-depth investigation. Especially when designing questionnaires, second-hand materials can provide us with a general outline of the industry and help designers grasp the problems to be investigated.

(3) Interview research. Including internal interviews, in-depth interviews and focus interviews. Internal interview is the confirmation of second-hand information and an important supplement to second-hand information. Through internal interviews, we can understand the general ideas of business operators about the projects to be carried out, and internal interviews are also the best way to find business problems. In-depth interview is a typical in-depth interview with users to make up for the deficiency of questionnaire survey. In-depth interview is a one-on-one conversation on an argument and a series of inquiry questions to understand the interviewee's views on something or the reasons for doing something. Generally, a detailed discussion outline should be designed before the interview, and the issues to be discussed should be universal. Focus interview is to design a more comprehensive questionnaire or cooperate with in-depth interviews. Focus interviews can be used to get information. Focus interview is an interviewer trained by an enterprise, who guides 8 ~ 12 people (customers) to discuss a topic or concept in depth. Focus interviews usually avoid direct questions, but use indirect questions to stimulate participants' spontaneous discussion, which can stimulate participants' inspiration and let them speak freely and find important information in a "safe" environment.

Select the survey object

Some enterprises often only look for those old customers (loyal customers) they are familiar with when determining the object of investigation, and exclude those customers who may be dissatisfied with themselves. Sometimes, some enterprises only conduct customer satisfaction surveys when they hold product production and marketing meetings and order meetings. Newcomers often want something from the enterprise, so they have to say more good things and say less bad things. Moreover, because such symposiums are often confined to dealers, those who attend production and marketing meetings and order meetings are often only the purchasing staff of dealers, not the end users of products, and even have no direct contact with the buyers or end users of products.

If there are fewer customers, a comprehensive investigation should be conducted. But for most enterprises, it is very difficult and unnecessary to conduct a comprehensive survey of customers, and a scientific random sampling survey should be carried out. In the selection of sampling methods, in order to ensure the representativeness of samples, random sampling can be carried out according to the types of customers: dealers and end users at all levels, and the regional scope of customers (East China, South China, North China and West China). In the determination of sample size, in order to obtain more complete information, it is necessary to ensure that the sample size is large enough, but at the same time, the cost and time limit of the investigation should be considered.

Collect customer satisfaction data

Customer satisfaction data can be collected by written or oral questionnaire, telephone or face-to-face interview, and online customer satisfaction survey can also be conducted if there is a website. Surveys usually contain many questions or statements, and respondents need to choose the corresponding answers behind the questions according to the preset table. Sometimes in the process of investigation, respondents will be asked to answer in an open way, so that more detailed information can be obtained. Be able to grasp valuable information about customer satisfaction. The survey method enables customers to evaluate the service quality, customer service and customer satisfaction of enterprises from their own interests.

scientific analysis

Nowadays, many enterprises simply calculate the average comparison according to the calculation method formulated by their own companies after conducting customer satisfaction surveys. In fact, if we further choose appropriate analytical tools and methods, the measurement results of customer satisfaction can provide us with a lot of useful information. According to the analysis of customer satisfaction survey results, the commonly used methods are: analysis of variance, Shewhart control chart, two-sample T-test, process capability histogram and pareto chart. Therefore, in order to objectively reflect customer satisfaction, enterprises must determine, collect and analyze appropriate customer satisfaction data, and adopt scientific and effective statistical analysis methods to confirm the suitability and effectiveness of the quality management system, and evaluate what aspects can be continuously improved. Customer satisfaction data analysis will provide the following information:

(1) Customer satisfaction;

(2) Meet the service requirements;

(3) Characteristics and trends of processes and services, including opportunities to take preventive measures;

(4) Process and result of continuous improvement of products or services:

(5) Constantly identify customers and analyze changes in customer needs.

Enterprises should establish and improve the analysis system, input more customer data into the database, continuously collect relevant customer information, verify and update customer information, and delete outdated information. At the same time, we should use scientific methods to analyze the changes and trends of customers. Studying the change of customer's consumption behavior and finding out the law of its change will lay a good foundation for improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Improve planning and implementation

After scientific analysis of the collected customer satisfaction information, enterprises should immediately check their own work processes, conduct self-examination and self-correction under the principle of "customer-centered", find out the processes that are not in line with customer satisfaction management, make improvement plans for enterprises, and organize employees to implement them in order to achieve customer satisfaction.