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

Earlier we had made you aware of the danger of “no frame of reference” and how it can be avoided. Presented below is the second common blunder associated with this type of research – and how you can avoid it.

Second Blunder: No tracking.

Many businesses only perform a single study to measure customer satisfaction. There can be logistical, financial or other barriers to repeating this research. In addition, businesses may feel that they’ve achieved their research objectives. However, it’s often valuable to know whether satisfaction is getting better or worse and it’s hard to learn this from a single study. Also, things going on in the marketplace can distort single-study results.

Solution: Track customer satisfaction over time by deploying surveys regularly. The frequency with which you repeat this research depends upon the nature of your customer base (size, churn, purchase frequency, etc.). It may not be necessary to ask every question every time. For example, you could field a full survey once a year and a shortened quarterly version – possibly with a smaller sample size – in between.

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.