Most businesses want to know how satisfied their customers are, and what can be done to make them even more satisfied. However, if not done right, then the online surveys used to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty can produce useless or (even worse) misleading results.

In this ongoing series, we’ll present four common blunders even the most experienced researchers sometimes make and how to avoid them.

First Blunder: No frame of reference.

Too often customer surveys don’t go beyond overall and detailed (attribute) ratings of the client’s business. This means that researchers have little context for interpreting the results and can’t answer key questions.

Solution: Design your survey to provide a frame of reference. Consider adding questions about your performance compared to expectations and/or competitors. Conducting a companion survey of employees (especially sales) with similar questions can also be useful.

Gold Research Inc. has extensive experience in journey mapping, path-to-purchase research, deploying customer intercepts and mobile surveys for concept testing, marketing testing, satisfaction research, shopper insights, and mystery shopping. We can also act as an extension of your research team in helping with data processing, analysis, report development, and survey programming. Contact us at 1-800-549-7170 or send us an email for a free 30-minute consultation on this topic.