Overall Satisfaction Metrics

Overall satisfaction is not necessarily what you want to research when you're looking at something like customer satisfaction. It's nice to know, certainly, but it doesn't help you track your improvements, and it can be misleading – all it takes is one bad component in an otherwise great company to lose a customer.

But it's not useless. It's certainly interesting on its face, and if it changes dramatically there are likely reasons to believe that something in your company has been fixed, or been hurt. There is another interesting reason for this as well – to see how important some factor in your company is.

One thing that overall satisfaction may be able to help you figure out is how important some aspect of your company is for long-term business. This can only be true, however, if: Your company measures individual components in your business. One or two of these components has a number that is vastly different from the rest.

It's not scientific by any means, but when your company qualifies for the two issues listed above, your "Overall Satisfaction" level may become more interesting. The best way to show this is with examples. Let's look at the following imaginary company satisfaction scores : Customer Service: 8 Product Choice: 2 Product Availability: 7 Cost: 7 Overall Satisfaction: 7 What this says is, overall, product choice is not very important.

It indicates that while a product choice improvement could be highly beneficial, it's not necessarily tipping the scales in terms of overall satisfaction and how they view your company. It should be noted that product choice could still affect sales, but at this point we're only discussing its effects on overall satisfaction levels. Now let's look at another one: Customer Service: 8 Product Choice: 2 Product Availability: 7 Cost: 7 Overall Satisfaction: 4 Here we see something else.

This indicates that product choice satisfaction may be very important, because this small difference has had a profound effect on the overall satisfaction level. No answers are ever quite this simple, of course. If it was, this type of research would be much easier.

But that is a great example of the way that your data can say more than it does at first glance, and why overall satisfaction levels can still be valuable. Here's more on how to design customer satisfaction surveys using SurveyMethods.