The Importance of Adding Importance Part 2

Recently we looked at the phenomenon that occurs in some businesses where customer satisfaction does not appear to affect revenue, leading many businesses to believe that it may not be as important for improving their business. An example would be if you took customer satisfaction scores at two or more intervals, saw a statistically significant increase, and yet revenue appeared to stay the same or drop during that timeframe. It’s easy to write off customer satisfaction when you see these types of trends, but there may be a different reason that satisfaction scores are not correlating to revenue – the individual questions may not be weighted according to the importance of the question for the customer.

Imagine you have a terrible, unknown illness. Over time, your health continues to deteriorate, and the doctors have no idea how to cure it – because they cannot figure out where the problem truly lies. So rather than cure it, they start treating the symptoms.

You’re feeling achy, so they give you Tylenol. You’re itching a lot, so they give you Calamine lotion. You’ve got insomnia so they give you Ambien.

The fever goes away, and you are able to get a good night’s sleep, but the itching doesn’t seem to stop – it may even be getting a little worse. The doctor asks you how each of your symptoms are doing. You tell him the sleeping is great, the fever is gone and you’re feeling much better, but the itching is getting worse.

Here, your overall “satisfaction” score with the treatments the doctor gave you has become much higher, since two of the three symptoms have improved. Yet the final symptom still shows that you’re sick and getting worse, and over time the itching has become unbearable. Satisfaction is significantly higher, but you are still not well, and just because the satisfaction scores are higher does not mean that your health has suddenly improved.

You are still getting worse.

What we see from this example is that it’s possible for aspects of your satisfaction to improve without the problem getting any better. Even though the overall satisfaction score may increase, the numbers that are increasing may not be the numbers that are most important to the customer. How do you solve this problem? We’ll look for answers to that question in an upcoming article.

Related Blog Part 1 Related Blog Part 3