Does your feedback cycle give you clear priorities for marketing and development? I often see this aspect only partially completed and it negatively impacts the rest of the feedback cycle.
Asking about overall satisfaction in some way is very useful.
- Internally tracking the business: ‘Last year, we scored 7/10 for satisfaction but this year it has improved to 8/10’
- Marketing: ‘99% of our customers recommend us’
- Benchmarking: “Apia led the way with a high score of +69 in the renowned 2009 Net Promoters Score. Far ahead of its competitors, the average score for this category was only +2.” Source APIA
Be clear about your aims so you ask about satisfaction in a beneficial way.
Big picture question: How likely are you to recommend The Australian Businesswomen’s Network on a scale from 0-10, where 0 is very low and 10 is very high?
- Good for measuring change over time as you can compare the average score between surveys and between segments of your customer base.
- Can benchmark your business against others as it is the question for calculating the Net Promoter Score.
- Don’t use for a quick marketing grab as you won’t get a useful number for that purpose.
- Be aware that people generally think about 7 as average in a 0-10 point scale, not 5.
Detail style question: How satisfied are you with the following services provided by the Australian Businesswomen’s Network, on a scale of 1-7 where 1=not satisfied and 7= very satisfied?
- Good for measuring views about specific aspects of your business if you word in a clear and simple way.
- Can use a ‘traffic light’ colour system to show the results to others internally – the aspects with the highest ratings are green (6 or 7) and those with middle scores orange (3, 4, or 5), then low scores are red (1 or 2).
- Don’t ask about too many aspects, otherwise participants will get tired and not individually rate each aspect.
- Be aware that you need to include a ‘not applicable’ option if some participants have not used the service you’re asking about. If you don’t include a ‘not applicable’ then they will leave the survey out of frustration or guess an answer, which will give you misleading results. For example, not everyone involved with the ABN has been involved with MentorNet so they can’t rate their level of satisfaction with it.
You can’t set priorities properly if you only ask about satisfaction.
If you ask about importance, as well as satisfaction, you can then identify aspects that are:
- high importance + low satisfaction = you need to improve as they are seen as weaknesses
- high importance + high satisfaction = you should be marketing as your strengths
- low importance + high satisfaction = stop investing time and money on
- low importance + low satisfaction = stop having this as part of your offering
Ask about the importance of the aspects in your business before asking about satisfaction. This can be easily done by asking: How important are the following when thinking about a business networking and educational group, on a scale of 1-7 where 1=not important and 7=very important?
- Good for orientating you to be thinking about your direct and indirect competitors.
- Can display as a scatter plot with satisfaction which easily shows priorities.
- Don’t change the wording of the aspects. Ask them the same way for both the importance and satisfaction otherwise you won’t be able to compare them later.
- Be aware of using your customer’s language, not yours, when talking about aspects in your business (for the satisfaction) or in the market generally (for the importance).
The benefit of these questions is that results can be presented 3 ways:
- visually
- written up descriptively
- as a simple number
This allows different types of people to absorb the information and think about ways to grow your business.
