Customers Influence CSAT Scores

Experienced customer satisfaction researchers often understand how important it is for you to come up with a baseline that is specific to your company, and judge satisfaction by that number accordingly. In other words, a satisfaction level of 6/10 at one store may be a higher level of satisfaction (or at least, more profitable) than a satisfaction level of 7/10 at another store. These numbers rarely match up accordingly, so comparing your numbers to those of another random company may be meaningless.

One of the best examples of this has to do with customers. As much as most survey respondents would like to believe this is not the case, how they interact with the customers often play a role in how they view the company itself.

Let’s explain this with an example: Someone lives in a city that is known for its especially aggressive parkers, and your company is known to do a lot of business. That likely means that customers are fighting for spots in your parking lot, trying to beat out a spot from someone else in order to nab the spot closest to the door. The person that is able to get the great spot is likely happy, but the person that lost out on the spot is probably now in a bad mood.

That person is likely to view the rest of their shopping experience with a slightly worse mood, all because they were beaten out of a parking spot. If this occurs more than once, they may start to view your business as a place they no longer think very highly of. Are they unlikely to shop with you because they could not get a great parking spot? Of course not.

You have great prices, great service – there is a reason that you are such a popular business. But when they answer questions about their overall satisfaction level, it becomes clear that their answers may not be glowingly positive, despite you as a company doing nothing wrong. The above story serves to illustrate why satisfaction, although extremely important, is not as easy to understand as simply reading a number and believing that your customer satisfaction methods are working.

Companies that have ample stories like the example above are always going to suffer, but they are still going to get good business because they as a company are still doing everything right. When other customers can affect customer satisfaction scores , it’s clear you need to create your own baseline for your satisfaction measurements.