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 customer surveys used to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty can produce useless or (even worse) misleading results.

Earlier we had made you aware of the dangers of “no frame of reference“, “no tracking“, “poor sampling“, and how they can be avoided.

Presented below is the fourth common blunder associated with this type of research – and how you can avoid it.

Fourth Blunder: Flawed attribute lists.

Many customer intercepts, in-store interviews, and online surveys ask customers to rate companies, brands, or products on a list of attributes. The problem is that these attribute lists are often too long, incomplete, and/or imbalanced. This can reduce overall data quality (respondent fatigue leading to item non-response, lack of variation, etc.). It can also yield misleading results – for example, if your list is incomplete or skewed, what the data suggests is most important may not be what’s truly most important to your customers.

Solution: Take the time to carefully construct your attribute list. Keep it as short as possible (minimize overlap/redundancy), include a mix of functional and emotional attributes (seeking input from multiple sources), use your customers’ vocabulary (e.g., from open-ended responses, interviews, or focus groups), and be consistent in wording and scaling if making comparisons with other/previous research.

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.