Customer Influence on CSAT

Customer satisfaction rarely measures something specific. Most often, the customer simply thinks back to how they “feel” about a company, without necessarily any rhyme or reason, and rates the company accordingly. Only a small percentage of customers are actually going to stop and consider all of the factors that lead to their customer satisfaction answer.

Most are going to go on instinct, and answer the question with the one that feels right. It is for that reason that companies need to be aware of all of the factors that go into a customer satisfaction score, and perhaps one of the most overlooked factors are the customers themselves.

Back when I was working for this very large grocery chain as a cashier, I had a great deal of experience with customers that were affected by other customers. While the grocery store itself was in a nice city, it was in an area of the city with a lot of crime, several low income housing units, and a high immigration rate. There were many customers that spoke no English or needed food stamps – there were even customers that paid with fake checks or came in drunk.

But this grocery store was also extremely busy, because it had the best prices and best selection in the area by a hefty margin. There was only one other grocery store nearby, and it couldn’t hold a candle to the costs or selection of this grocery chain, so few people used it.

But the customers here would cause all sorts of problems. The drunk ones would create commotion and make the grocery store uncomfortable. The food stamp ones would often try to purchase items that couldn’t go on food stamps.

The immigrants often had trouble understanding the employees, causing problems. Customers would yell at each other, bump into each other, and delay each other all throughout the purchasing process. On more than one occasion, a customer with a full cart of groceries would get fed up at other customers and walk out, leaving their groceries in the aisle.

All of these customers are going to come back, because we provided a level of service that was high enough that people liked us, and our prices and selection were better than anywhere else. But the customers themselves were clearly affecting the shopping experience of other customers, and as a result, there is simply no way that customer satisfaction scores would be very high for the workplace. If research compared our satisfaction scores to another company, they may think we were failing, and that couldn’t have been further from the truth.