The Importance of Adding Importance Part 1

Research into customer satisfaction has yielded many different types of results. While it’s well known that customer satisfaction is valuable, it is not uncommon for some businesses to find that the satisfaction scores are not directly relating to sales – meaning that although focusing on satisfaction may have some intangible benefits, it is not helping improve revenue for the company. There are many different suggestions for why this may be the case.

Not the least of which is that it’s possible that satisfaction at all companies is not created equal, and that some companies need higher satisfaction scores than others. Still, there may be a simpler reason that satisfaction scores are occasionally bringing up unusual results with regard to revenue: A lack of individualized question weighting.

Weighting is a well-known technique used in data analysis. It’s especially useful when things like the demographics of a sample are nowhere near the demographics of a population. For example, if your population is 85% women, and your survey sample is 15% women, you may want to weight your data so that the population is more correctly represented. Most people that have studied statistics at least understand the basics of weighting, and some companies already weight some aspects of their survey more heavily than others.

One of the reasons that it is possible for customer satisfaction scores to not seem related to revenue is because very few companies account for the idea that what is important to one person may not be as important to another. For example, let’s say you run a customer satisfaction survey on two separate occasions. The first time you run the survey you find satisfaction at around 5 out of 10 on average.

Not great results. You run the survey again six months later after putting forth some additional CRM efforts, and you find that the average score is about 7 out of 10 – considerably better. Yet you also notice that during that time, revenue appears to be unchanged.

Or perhaps even worse – it appears that people are leaving your company for a competitor. It would be easy to believe that this proves that customer satisfaction isn’t related to revenue in your company.

But it turns out that may not be the case, and we’ll look at the reasons for this in an upcoming article. Related Blog Part 3 Related Blog Part 2