Customer Satisfaction Market Research
What can Customer Satisfaction Market Research Do for My Business?
- Remembering the adage "perceptions are reality"? Well the customer's perceptions are the only ones that matter with regard to how your product does in the marketplace.
- Customer Satisfaction research can help to align internal brand perceptions with those of the market by asking, unbiased, objective, customers what they think about different aspects of a product (BTW - they're almost always some significant differences between what employees think their brand means and what the market's perception are)
- Uncover weaknesses (perceived or real) in your products so they can be fixed with the next update, or at least in the next generation of the product category.
- Understand how your product effects the overall perceptions of your company's brand and why (it could actually be a very simple fix that is due to customer's using your equipment slightly differently than you'd expected)
- Help your employees to step out of their "company bubble" and actually get more in tune with the lives and practices of actual customers.
- We all know the saying about a satisfied customer telling one person that they like a product and a dissatisfied customer telling a dozen friends and colleagues a passionate story about how your company did them wrong - it all goes to the bottom line in the end!
What is Customer Satisfaction Market Research?
Customer Satisfaction Market Research is simply understanding how well a product is performing in the eyes of the customer. There are usually a list of specific attributes that are probed on and then a few [open ended] questions where they can tell you something that you may not have even considered before. At the end of the day Customer Satisfaction Market Research often becomes a management metric to keep track of how well an organization is serving their customers (and a good research study will often correlate with market share eventually).
How Does Customer Satisfaction Market Research Work?
Customer Satisfaction market research is almost always a quantitative venture, at least initially. There are times when the quantitative data is a little bit to "flat" to really understand what the responses meant as they compared on brand to another, and in that case a small qualitative study may be commissioned to understand some of the more subtle details that separated the different brands.
Customer Satisfaction Market Research is actually a pretty easy type of research. You contact customers who have used your product for a reasonable length of time and ask them how they feel about it. Initially you ask them broad questions about overall function and quality and then you break down the functions or the specific tasks and get them to rate them in some way. Your always going to have some complaints about something - some people like one thing and the next respondent thinks just the opposite. What you're trying to do is to ensure that there aren't any class problems that bother nearly everyone. And from generation to generation of a product you're hoping that even as you reduce your costs, that you can continue to increase the overall satisfaction scores.
In most Customer Satisfaction Market Research there are three overall questions that are asked of each respondent: 1) How would you rate your overall satisfaction of this product? 2) Would you repurchase this product again? And 3) Would you recommend this product to a friend? Those questions are usually asked on a 5 point scale - from "extremely likely", "somewhat likely" "unsure" to "somewhat unlikely" and "extremely unlikely" If you get all "extremely likely" responses then that's a home run for your product. If one or more dip below that mark you probably need to look through the data and find out why they were unhappy.
