A complete guide to customer satisfaction research

If you’re not in business to create happy customers, you won’t be in business for very long.

Customer satisfaction research is the best way to determine how happy your customers are with your product or service. It also enables you to ensure their happiness becomes long-term satisfaction. When you understand customer feedback, you can improve your products and services, increase customer loyalty, and drive long-term success.

In this article, we’ll take a detailed look at what this type of research is and how you can conduct it.

Happy customers are repeat customers. They are likely to tell their friends and colleagues about the products and services they enjoy, potentially sending new customers your way.

Unsatisfied customers are the opposite. They won’t return, and they will possibly warn their friends, family members, and colleagues to stay away too. It stands to reason that building a successful brand means creating far more happy customers than unhappy ones.

Customer satisfaction research is the process of collecting and analyzing feedback from customers to understand how well you are meeting their expectations and needs. This vital research can help your business improve its products and services, ensuring happier and more loyal customers.

Through customer satisfaction research, you can learn which steps your company should take to create more happy customers.

Getting more happy customers and fewer unhappy customers is important as a general aim, but it’s quite broad. Customer satisfaction research has several concrete goals that it provides insights into. Some companies begin their journey into customer satisfaction research specifically because they have one or more of these goals in mind:

• Improving product/service quality

• Enhancing customer loyalty and retention

• Gaining a competitive advantage

• Identifying areas for improvement

• Measuring the impact of business initiatives

To provide you with actionable insights, customer satisfaction research needs to be comprehensive. It isn’t enough to know whether a customer is happy with your brand or not; you need to understand the specifics of what makes them happy or unhappy.

Here are some objectives:

• Measure overall customer satisfaction levels

• Understand the drivers of satisfaction

• Identify strengths and weaknesses

• Track changes in satisfaction over time

• Benchmark against industry standards

• Gather feedback for product/service development

Understanding how your company measures up in these areas will enable you to determine whether you have a problem with customer satisfaction. It will also provide an important guide for how to address those issues and improve how customers view your brand. 

The worst thing you can do is assume you know the answers to these questions. For example, you might think you know what your customers love about your product, but what they value in reality might be different. Businesses often misjudge their own value proposition, leaving marketing opportunities on the table and failing to fully communicate value to existing customers.

When you know the true reasons your satisfied customers keep coming back, you can incorporate that into your value proposition. This will make your marketing efforts more effective, helping you retain customers who might not have considered that positive aspect of your offering before.

This information also tells you which of your features are worth developing further, which need work to live up to your expectations of them, and which you can abandon entirely.

All the questions above can be applied to a number of customer satisfaction questions. Trying to answer them all at once will result in unfocused and possibly unhelpful research. Instead, it’s best to focus your research on one or two areas. Some common areas for customer satisfaction research are listed below:

• Product/service quality

• Customer support and service

• Pricing and value perception

• Ease of doing business

• Brand reputation and loyalty

• Post-purchase experience

• Comparison to competitor offerings

You might not know which of these you should start with. By gathering some initial customer feedback, you can narrow down which of these topics are strengths and which are weaknesses, allowing you to drill down deeper in your next round of research.

We can also take a different view of granularity when doing customer satisfaction research. Customers interact with your brand on several levels. Their opinions of the brand at each of these levels may vary.

Transactional (single interaction)

This level of customer satisfaction deals with a single interaction. While a customer could generally be very happy with your brand, an individual transaction could annoy them in some way. Eliminating these sources of annoyance could be the tipping point that pushes less satisfied customers toward brand loyalty and away from dissatisfaction.

Here are some examples of transactional customer satisfaction research:

• Post-purchase surveys

• Service desk satisfaction surveys

• Website/app feedback surveys

• Point-of-sale customer satisfaction ratings

• Event feedback forms

Relational (ongoing relationship)

This deals with the customer’s overall perception of your brand independent of any single interaction.

Just as it’s possible for a generally happy customer to have a negative single experience, customers can develop a negative view of your brand even if they have one or two great transactions.

By looking at customer satisfaction from a broader perspective and focusing on the customer’s view of your brand itself, you can unlock deeper insights into what makes customers leave or stay.

Examples of relational customer satisfaction research include the following:

• Customer satisfaction and loyalty survey programs

• Churn/retention analysis

• Net promoter score (NPS) surveys

• Long-term, in-depth customer interviews

• Quarterly customer surveys

• Brand perception studies

Holistic (overall experience)

This level of customer satisfaction research involves combining the previous two. Instead of focusing solely on single interactions or the brand’s overall perception, holistic customer satisfaction research examines the entire picture.

So, why is this helpful? In customer satisfaction, the whole is often more than the sum of its parts. By looking at how everything fits together, you can get a broader sense of which areas need adjustment.

Examples of holistic customer satisfaction research include the following:

• Customer journey mapping

• Customer lifecycle analysis

• Omnichannel experience surveys

• Ethnographic studies and observational research

• Comprehensive customer feedback programs

Although the specifics will depend on your business and the type of customer research you’re interested in, the seven steps below provide a solid roadmap for successfully carrying out customer satisfaction research.

Step 1: define research objectives

The first step is defining your objectives. Before you can research something, you need to know what you’re researching.

Your research objectives might include, for example, retaining customers, improving marketing and sales efforts, elevating long-term product use, and more.

Next, identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll be measuring. These can include retention rate, monthly active users, repeat purchase rate, net promoter score, customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores, churn rate, and various customer support metrics, among other things. Include these or any others that are specific to your goals. 

As you’re deciding what your objectives are and which KPIs to use, ensure that your choices align with your business objectives.

Step 2: select a research methodology

The next step is to determine which research methodology you’ll use to gather your data. Quantitative methods, such as surveys and rating scales, can provide concrete numbers that are easy to track over time. Qualitative methods, such as interviews and focus groups, can provide more in-depth information about what customers do and don’t like about your product or service.

In practice, you’ll likely want to use a mixture of these two methods. A hybrid approach will provide you with data you can use to compare your results with industry standards or past results from your own research. It will also give you more actionable insights to drive those numbers in the direction you want.

Step 3: develop customer satisfaction surveys

If surveys will be a part of your methodology, you need to decide what those surveys will entail.

Remember, focus is key. There are many questions you can ask customers, but you should limit yourself to those that directly address the current research topic. This will make the data easier to sort through and help you use your resources more effectively. 

When crafting your surveys, consider your customers. If you want to get a sufficient number of well-thought-out responses, you’ll need to make sure the surveys are easy and convenient to complete. Overly lengthy surveys or those that use challenging technologies can limit the number and quality of responses you get.

The customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is the simplest and most straightforward method for measuring customer satisfaction. It typically involves asking customers to rate their satisfaction with a specific interaction or transaction on a scale, such as 1–5.

Step 4: choose a sampling strategy

Next, decide who you’ll be conducting research on. Do you have a specific customer segment that you’d like to better understand? If your company makes heavy use of customer personas, it can be helpful to survey each of them independently to better understand how to appeal to them.

Here are some sampling methods you can consider:

• Random sampling: randomly pick participants from your full customer base to ensure each customer has an equal chance of being included.

• Stratified sampling: divide your customer base into distinct subgroups and sample equally from each to ensure complete representation across key segments.

• Systematic sampling: choose every nth customer from a list to ensure an even spread of participants.

• Convenience sampling: select participants who are easiest to reach or most readily available, which is quicker but may not be as representative.

Sampling can be a complex topic. With a little research into statistics, you’ll be able to calculate sample sizes based on desired confidence levels and margins of error.

Step 5: data collection and analysis

Now we come to the meat and potatoes of customer satisfaction research—the collection and analysis of the data. If you’re conducting surveys, this could mean online forms, phone calls, or in-person questioning. Whatever your method, collect all the data and store it in a convenient place.

Tools like Dovetail make it easy to do the following:

• Collect disparate data types and create a single source of truth around customer insights

• Sort through the data and glean actionable insights from what you have collected

• Analyze both quantitative and qualitative results, identify trends and patterns, and determine what the next steps should be

Step 6: implement changes

Once you have analyzed the data, it’s time to put what you have learned into action.

First, identify all the areas that need improvement and prioritize them. The insights provided by customers can provide a great metric for prioritization, but be sure to also factor in the resources available to you and your business goals.

Once you have decided which areas to work on, develop an action plan to make the necessary changes. To stay organized, assign responsibility for overseeing these changes to someone who is capable and reliable. You might have several people handle larger changes, each with their own specific area of the plan.

Step 7: implement a feedback loop

Customer satisfaction research isn’t a one-and-done thing. You’ll want to revisit the research regularly to ensure that changing customer preferences and market dynamics haven’t altered how your customers view you. Quantitative measurements that can be tracked over time can be a big help.

If you’re making improvements but the rate of improvement is leveling off compared to previous results, it could indicate that a change is underway, shifting customer desires. It could also mean that you’re nearing peak customer satisfaction. The best way to know for sure is to set up more customer satisfaction research to understand your numbers.

The important thing is that you don’t let your customer satisfaction efforts become stagnant. Customer needs and preferences change all the time, and if you’re not making an effort to meet those evolving needs, a competitor will happily step in and do it for you.