Top 10 Best Practices for Improving Customer Satisfaction

Customer Satisfaction Best Practices

The importance of measuring customer satisfaction and its related construct, customer loyalty, continues to grow. Also, the “State of the Science” has improved dramatically as more companies have focused on generating customer satisfaction, which inevitably raises the bar for all. We thought you might enjoy reviewing our take on the top 10 best practices for improving customer satisfaction.

Top 10 Best Practices

1. Satisfaction is a relative measure vis a vis customer expectations –understanding expectations and fulfillment against those expectations is critical.
2. The use of regression analysis and other dependency models to derive the importance of attributes relative to an outcome measure is now considered a must.
3. To improve resource allocation, attributes should be separated into “Cost of Entry”, Performance Drivers (more is better) and “Delighters”.
4. Satisfaction, perceived value and customer loyalty are different from each other. They interact with each other to predict customer retention.
5. The effect of customer satisfaction on profitability is clearly exerted through an intervening variable such as retention.
6. Some companies have developed robust models that permit management to test the effects of changes in customer satisfaction on customer retention and profitability … allowing for explicit cost-benefit analysis and planning.
7. Customer satisfaction surveys benefit from highly structured design, measurement and analytic approaches – trending over time adds to the power of the data.
8. A two-stage nested structure can be very desirable – it links specific operational actions to primary dimensions of quality or satisfaction and then to overall satisfaction and/or loyalty.
9. While products/services that require little introspection on the part of the consumer is an exception, experience across a variety of industries suggests that placement of the overall satisfaction measure toward the end of the survey yields dependence models with greater explanatory power.
10. Voice-of-Customer (VOC) and Voice-of-Market (VOM) are two different constructs: one impacts customer retention, the other impacts customer acquisition. Understanding how proposed changes in service quality impact both groups can be critical.