7 June 2013 519 words, 3 min. read

Avoid biased results when measuring customer satisfaction

By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab PhD in marketing, director of IntoTheMinds
Measuring satisfaction of clients is a widespread practice among large companies as we showed in an earlier post. A new practice is however to link employees’ salaries to customer satisfaction scores. We’ve had the opportunity to witness this practice in […]

Measuring satisfaction of clients is a widespread practice among large companies as we showed in an earlier post. A new practice is however to link employees’ salaries to customer satisfaction scores.

We’ve had the opportunity to witness this practice in two large automotive retail groups in Belgium last month. In one of them we also witnessed what kind of excesses this practice may lead to.

 

An example of well-implement customer satisfaction practices …

The D’Ieteren group, Volkswagen’s official importer in Belgium, is on the Belgian stock market and as such must measure and monitor all sorts of KPI’s to assess its performance; customer satisfaction is one of them.

When you bring your car for maintenance in one of their service points, you will just remain impressed by the quality of the service you received. There is no doubts to have on the fact that service representatives are trained (and very well trained actually) to give this level of service. They have conceived very clever leaflets to instruct customers on how to assess their own satisfaction. Similar to what Heathrow airport has implemented, a visual representation is used to identify the four levels of the satisfaction scale (extremely satisfied – satisfied – dissatisfied – extremely dissatisfied).

When you get your keys back the representative tells you that you’ll be called to survey your satisfaction level.

Up to that point there is little to say; d’ieteren does it perfect.

 

… if the customer satisfaction data had not been biased

It’s when you get your keys back that things start going wrong. The service representative then instructs you how to answer the survey. He explains that his bonus is linked to how satisfy you are and suggests that you answer with “extremely satisfied”. Although it’s true that he does everything to satisfy you, overall satisfaction doesn’t depend only on his performance and strongly suggesting customers to be “extremely satisfied” will undoubtedly lead to erroneous (read “biased”) results.

 

Advice for your marketing strategy

If you have already invested efforts and money into measuring the satisfaction of your cherished customers, you should make sure that the data collection ensures unbiased results. Linking bonuses to customer satisfaction results seems to us a good idea at a high-level but a nightmare to implement.

Customer satisfaction is a composite experience. It is based on the overall and instinctive assessment of a complex experience (most of the time) that includes several touchpoints and a value chain containing several steps. Assessing satisfaction at the end of the value chain is good for getting overall satisfaction scores; yet it will not help you assess the satisfaction with the different steps involved.

The second drawback is that linking salaries and bonuses to satisfaction scores can only work if everyone is concerned and if everyone can positively influence those scores. Considering the example of D’Ieteren, do you really think the service representative will be able to positively make a difference if you get back your keys with a huge bill and remaining problems on your car ?



Posted in Marketing.

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