Tài liệu Customer SatisfactionResearch

Customer SatisfactionResearch

The majority of organisations today, both public and private, include customer satisfaction as aprimary business or organisational objective. Indeed, most aim to deliver high levels of customersatisfaction and many have made significant investments in Customer Care or Customer Serviceprogrammes. The ability to set customer satisfaction objectives is dependent on theorganisation’s ability to understand the priorities of its customers in the first place, andsubsequently to put in place mechanisms to measure accurately levels of customer satisfaction.Customer Satisfaction Measurement (CSM) is the term used by market researchers to describebroad research activities that help to understand and measure customer satisfaction. Thisdocument provides an overview of why CSM is important to all organisations no matter how largeor small, outlines the objectives of different types of customer satisfaction research studies, andhighlights 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 manycases the customer is lost because they have defected to the competition. This is often referredto by marketeers as ‘customer decay’ or ‘customer attrition’. In some markets, the averageattrition rate is between 10 and 30%! There are many reasons why a customer defects, butwithout 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’ isnot necessarily perceived as an urgent problem. But ‘customer decay’ should in fact be aproblem for all organisations and ignoring it is both dangerous and inefficient.The underlying logic for minimising `customer decay’ is simple: the cost of acquiring newcustomers is higher than the cost of retaining existing customers. As we shall see, there is such athing as an unprofitable customer and, therefore, circumstances when acquiring new customersis a better strategy than holding on to undesirable customers, but in general it is now a widelyaccepted business theory that customer retention optimises profitability.So, there is a fundamentally good reason for measuring customer satisfaction: understandingcustomer needs and delivering high levels of customer satisfaction ensures a high levels ofcustomer loyalty, and this in turn enhances profitability.For public sector organisations also, customer loyalty is a key measure of their performance.Public sector bodies which provide excellent service to their “customers” are fulfilling a key tenetof contemporary public service philiosophy and most government departments now set rigorousrequirements for meeting the highest customer service standards.