Customer Satisfaction Studies: Profit Workhorse
By EDC Guest Columnist Monica Vernon, President of Vernon Research Group
At Vernon Research Group, we see regular customer satisfaction studies as key building blocks for future growth and development of all types of organizations. They not only assess the status quo but give key glimpses at how the customers would like to redefine their worlds and how the company’s future offerings might make their lives better.
We define market research as a combined art and science where insights are gained from markets so that organizations can properly assess and impact their opportunities and challenges with those markets. Savvy organizations both large and small conduct regular customer satisfaction research. Most use it as a great way to get a report card from their most valued constituents while gaining ideas about how to continue to reap the benefits of their customers’ loyalty.
Particularly astute organizations realize that regular customer service studies also provide knowledge for understanding:
- How to market to their customers
- How to talk to them
- When to talk to them
- What words and stories to tell
- What to spend more time explaining and what they don’t want to hear about
- How the customers are translating brand, image, and other messages
- How to sell to their customers
- When, where and how to sell to them
- How to provide services to their customers
- When, where and how to best service them
- How they feel about price
- How they feel about delivery
- How they feel about the people of the organization
- How to improve current offerings
- What is working and what isn’t
- What would make the products and or services better
- What else customers might buy from them
- What other problems or challenges or situations they have that they think this company might be able to help them with
- What other problems or challenges or situations they have that they think this company might be able to help them with
Many customer satisfaction studies begin with a qualitative phase such as in-depth interviews or focus groups to truly understand the most salient issue areas. This phase is followed by a quantification phase conducted either by telephone interview or through an online study so that the importance of issues identified can be determined.
But even though a well designed and written regular customer satisfaction study can be a real workhorse for organizations, many businesses still do not understand that it can also play the role of a faucet in filling the pipeline of new product development.
Since the late ‘80s or early ‘90s much of corporate America has had company mandates to offer new and improved products and services and to develop them at a much higher rate than in the past. Large corporate organizations have had to think, act and organize much more like entrepreneurs in order to engage in and continue this evolution of product offerings. From ideation and concept testing to gauging utility values of features and prices of new product and service, market research methodologies such as Max Diff, Conjoint Analysis and other advanced analysis methods can help organizations meet their development goals.
However, as we continue to refine systems and assist in strategic alliances with corporate and entrepreneurial customers, there is a need for thinking long term. New products and services don’t just come out of nowhere. Sometimes there is a lack of concepts to test. Sometimes it is due to a dry period where not a lot of customer “listening” was done or even a situation where company employees are just so close to the situations that they have a hard time seeing new opportunities. Even some successful entrepreneurs are like the “one hit wonders” of the ‘60s record era. But that doesn’t have to be the case.
We urge our customers to utilize data and verbatim comments from regular and comprehensive customer satisfaction studies to feed the “ideation and concept development pipeline.” Just as in pharmaceutical testing where not every drug makes it to the market, we see that same situation in most other industries in which we work. Ideas abound but engineers can’t always find a cost-effective method of creating a solution. Many concepts must be dreamed up in order to produce just one successful product. Regular customer satisfaction studies, like a holistic approach to other areas of life, can do more than just assist with short-term changes and message information on current offerings. It can provide the seed that grows the ideas and concepts that blossom into the next company profit center.
