Question: what’s the relationship between experience and satisfaction? Often, measures of experience are expressed as highly aggregated satisfaction indices; such as net promoter scores.
These can be a useful, ‘first glance’ indicator but they have the potential to mask issues that really are crucial to delivering great products and services. Customer satisfaction surveys often display the same problem as they typically consist of fewer than 10 questions so only scratch the surface of customer attitudes and dispositions.
These days most brands seek to generate an emotional reaction in their customers. If this is the objective then any evaluation of the customer experience needs to operate at the same level: and half a dozen self-completion questions aren’t going to do that.
A quick and easy feedback form is great for gathering an initial level of feedback but it cannot be the end of the story. Why should a customer think a company is seriously interested in what how they react to their service if all they see is a brief online questionnaire?
Seriously detailed (i.e. seriously-insightful and useful) feedback can only be generated via an in-depth discussion of key stages of the customer experience and how customers ‘felt’ after each stage. Many people take time to warm up to talking about their emotions and their exploration can require creative techniques rather than simply talking about them.
All this suggests companies need to invest in exploring their customers’ reaction to the experience they offer rather than simply generating a superficial view of the proportion for which it crossed an arbitrary satisfaction threshold.
To discuss the ways in which your customer experience can be explored please contact Chris Taylor chris@lawsontaylor.co.uk