Practical Procedure For Measuring Customer Satisfaction

STEP 3:

• Determination of relevant attributes is the next important step.
• It is very important that this takes place in co-operation with the customer. In too many cases companies themselves define what is relevant to the customer.
• This is a very bad idea because experience shows that very often companies only have a vague impression of what is really relevant to the customer.
• It follows from this that customers should participate in defining the relevant attributes and the best way of doing this is usually by setting up focus groups.
• Groups with approximately eight members are usually efficient if they are led by trained psychologists or moderators.
• The groups come up with a list of relevant parameters and this list will be the starting point for the next step in which a questionnaire is designed.

STEPS 4, 5 AND 6

• In this group of steps the sampling takes place but first of all it must be decided whether competitors should be included in the analysis.
• In many cases it will be a great advantage to have competitors in the analysis but this will of course make the entire customer satisfaction analysis somewhat larger.
• Furthermore it may complicate the analysis because in some cases it will be difficult to find respondents who know both the company in question and the competitors.
• Depending upon the decision concerning competitors a questionnaire must be designed. The size of the questionnaire should be kept to a minimum in order not to annoy the customers. We usually recommend that the number of parameters should not exceed 30.

STEPS 7 AND 8

•  Before constructing quality maps it will usually be a good idea to go through the collected material in order to let the data speak.
•  First of all it is very useful to find out whether there are any segments in the material other than the ones already defined.
• This can be done by using a variety of statistical tools. If significant groupings are found, these groupings will also be used when reporting the final results.
• Furthermore the material should also be analyzed in order to find out what kind of quality the different parameters represent. Is it expected quality or perhaps value-added?
• To this end different techniques have been developed by different market research companies. This kind of information will be very important when evaluating the possible outcome of actions taken later on.

STEPS 9, 10 AND 11

• The following step will be to introduce the quality map.
• This map is based upon the theoretical result above in which the optimum was found when the importance is equal to the satisfaction for each parameter.

              The map is constructed by plotting the importance on the horizontal axis against the satisfaction on the vertical axis. To reach optimum profit, theory then shows us that the parameters should be placed on the principal diagonal of this map.

Very often, however, decision makers are not as strict as this. Instead the map is divided into squares by dividing each axis into two, using the average importance and the average satisfaction as dividing points.