Tracking Small CSAT Trends

Researching customer satisfaction may be valuable, but measurements take work and a trained eye. Companies want to see that their initiatives work quickly, because they understand that customer satisfaction is an important part of building revenue. Yet it doesn’t often work that way.

Customer satisfaction tends to be a slow process, and so scores can occasionally move very slowly. Customers aren’t likely to be swayed by any change in service or products overnight. They’ve had weeks, months, or possibly even years of experience with your products and your people, and a small, little change is not going to affect their memories.

Your best efforts will make a difference, but that difference is going to take time, and it’s not uncommon for some of your customers to not even realize they are more satisfied until a considerable amount of time has passed.

It’s also possible that trends in customer satisfaction are hidden by those that haven’t experienced the changes. For example, if you launch a customer satisfaction campaign that makes only 15% of all customers more satisfied, that number is still valuable, but when it is divided by the remaining 85% of unchanged scores, it may be difficult to see that any noticeable changes have occurred. Similarly, low satisfaction scores may be masked by high/apathetic survey respondents.

Overall, the implications here are simply that you need to be careful about how you interpret the customer satisfaction scores and how you formulate opinions on the results. You may need to find new ways to integrate changes in satisfaction within your survey that help you figure out if your campaign is working, such as: Asking questions about if they have noticed any recent changes that have altered their satisfaction. Asking questions about their hope that their expectations will rise in the future.

Asking questions that will help you figure out if they have experienced the benefits of your customer satisfaction strategy. How you go about doing this is up to you and your researchers, but it’s always important to remember that your while your survey research data is extremely important, how you interpret the results is equally as important. Take the time to create questions that will adequately tell you if any differences have been made, and always remember that there may be changes that you simply have yet to see, or are too difficult to currently find within your dataset.