Hidden CSAT Measurement Factor

There is no denying the value of the customer satisfaction survey. Customer satisfaction surveys are the best way to find out how your customers feel about your products, services, customer service, and even the faith they have in the company’s viability in the short and long term. Customer satisfaction surveys can help you spot potential problems before they cause you to lose customers or validate your current strategy so that you know you’re on the right track; these surveys hold immense value to your business.

Yet customer satisfaction surveys suffer from one major flaw – a flaw that even the most skilled market researchers tend to overlook. There is a secret, hidden factor in customer satisfaction that too few companies remember to account for, and may be the difference between success and failure in the future of your business.

When you research customer satisfaction, you send your survey out to current customers and receive a response that indicates their current level of satisfaction. This is useful. Maybe you notice that customers aren’t as happy as you’d like, or perhaps you find that the customers are all extremely satisfied with your products and services.

But something is missing – the unsatisfied customers. Customers that have stopped using your business are not included in these customer satisfaction surveys, altering the result and reducing the value of your insight. It should be no surprise that the customers that are currently still using your company are satisfied in general.

It’s the customers that have left you that may be able to tell you what you are doing wrong. It’s important that when you perform a customer satisfaction survey you find a balanced way of taking into account the opinions of those that left you. You can do this in a few ways: Survey Lost Customers – The simplest way is to survey lost customers using similar questions to your customer satisfaction survey, and including the data into your analysis.

Response rate tends to be fairly low, but there are ways to improve response rate as well as ways to adjust the numbers to give the lost customers a more accurate sample. Review Past Responses – Filtering out the responses from previous customer satisfaction surveys and looking for trends may also be useful. You may find that there were warning signs that the client was growing dissatisfied, and you can use that info to spot possible problems that may be occurring with current customers.

Not Overestimating Your Values – Finally, if you can’t collect data on lost customers, you can at least take into account the idea that several customers have been lost as you go through your data. If you see an overall current customer satisfaction score that is only slightly above where you want it to be, and you also lost many customers over the past year, it would be a good idea to assume that number is overestimating satisfaction when you use it to make decisions. It’s important to research your overall customer satisfaction scores.

They can tell you how your business is doing and help you come up with the next steps in your strategy. But never forget that hidden factor – the data you’ll find in lost customers. Until you account for those data, your scores are not going to be accurate.