An introduction to customer satisfaction research techniques and how it can help your business | Customer Satisfaction Research Customer Satisfaction Research An introduction to customer satisfaction research techniques and how it can help your business January 2001 Customer Satisfaction Research fact sheet I 2/11 ‘an introduction to customer satisfaction research’ The majority of organisations today, both public and private, include customer satisfaction as a primary business or organisational objective. Indeed, most aim to deliver high levels of customer satisfaction and many have made significant investments in Customer Care or Customer Service programmes. The ability to set customer satisfaction objectives is dependent on the organisation’s ability to understand the priorities of its customers in the first place, and subsequently to put in place mechanisms to measure accurately levels of customer satisfaction. Customer Satisfaction Measurement (CSM) is the term used by market researchers to describe broad research activities that help to understand and measure customer satisfaction. This document provides an overview of why CSM is important to all organisations no matter how large or small, outlines the objectives of different types of customer satisfaction research studies, and highlights some of the primary objectives of effective CSM programmes. Why Measure Customer Satisfaction? Most businesses lose a certain proportion of their customers in every year they trade, and in many cases the customer is lost because they have defected to the competition. This is often referred to by marketeers as ‘customer decay’ or ‘customer attrition’. In some markets, the average attrition rate is between 10 and 30%! There are many reasons why a customer defects, but without a doubt the primary driver is dissatisfion with the product or service being offered. Providing organisations can replace the lost customer with a new customer, ‘customer decay’ is not necessarily perceived as an urgent problem. But ‘customer decay’ should in fact be a problem for all organisations .
