How Do You Measure Customer Satisfaction?

Tuesday, 23 February 2010 14:14 Written by Peter Brockmann

We've all gotten the restaurant receipts - we want your feedback - visit this URL, tell us about your experience and you could win $1,000. One prize per week.

How do these companies actually use this information?

For fun, and to learn more about the potential for impact on my own attitude, I took a survey. Actually, I went to a fast food joint in our local central-MA area and was disappointed with the dirty dining area. Floor was littered with trash. Several trays were left on the tables where the customers hadn't cleaned up after themselves.

I took the survey and complained about the dirty dining area. Well, at the end of the process, I earned a $5 off coupon for my next visit.

So the brand gained important feedback in two ways:

They gained feedback from me to know that they had a service failure on that day at that restaurant. This way they could (if the information flows fast enough, and if the shift supervisors are incentivized to care enough) apply the bright light of management attention onto that establishment and correct the source of the service failure, and change the circumstances that led to the service failure.
They gave me feedback. They asked me for a repeat visit and gave me an incentive to visit them again.

This approach is measuring customer satisfaction is highly actionable. They let me vent, providing valuable feedback, and then they rewarded me for doing so, asking me to try them again soon. So, measuring customer satisfaction well doesn't have to be intensive market research initiatives or it doesn't have to ask me how loyal I am to the brand, measuring customer satisfaction just has to lead to actionable information, something Brockmann & Company calls 'Customer Insight.'

That's why our new Brockmann & Company Customer Insight service implements unique customer satisfaction processes and business improvement logic that helps our clients assure higher levels of customer satisfaction. Through these actionable results, we expect that customers can be inoculated from competitive overtures, both protecting the business and deepening the scope of the brand's relationship with the customer.