Improve Your Customer Satisfaction Questionnaire by Adding Another Dimension

Whether your goal is to understand your brand’s relationship with clients or measure the strength of your email subscriber list, it’s time to get serious about a customer satisfaction questionnaire. Your questions should be chosen with an eye toward keeping it as brief as possible – but not any briefer than needed to get a read on the strength and value of those relationships.

Will Your Customers Recommend Your Brand?

My first choice when dealing with customer loyalty is Fred Reichheld’s ‘Ultimate Question’…

(1) “How likely would you be to recommend (Company or Brand X) to a friend or colleague?”

This question is best rated on a 0-to-10 scale, with the lower end meaning ‘Not at All Likely to Recommend‘ and the upper end being ‘Extremely Likely to Recommend‘.

You can easily compute a ‘Net Promoter Score’ (NPS) which is simply the percentage of ‘Promoters’ (those rating your brand a 9 or 10) minus the percentage of ‘Detractors’ (those rating it a 6 or below).

Reichheld’s research (which has spawned considerable debate) suggests that this single measure, i.e., NPS, is highly correlated with business growth and that its effectiveness as a corporate metric lies in easy of comprehension among those implementing customer service improvement programs . His argument makes intuitive sense, as a positive comment from someone you know well is one of the strongest possible recommendations a potential customer could receive.

Will Customers Continue Buying?

While I admire the simplicity of this metric, other research has shown that the better practice is to include at least one additional dimension of customer loyalty in the development of your customer satisfaction questionnaire.

To improve your customer survey, you should consider the following question:

(2) “Six to 12 months from now, how likely are you to be using (Company or Brand X)?”

For respondent ease, I use the same 0-to-10 rating scale, but this time anchored with the phrases “Not at All Likely to Be Using Them” on the lower end and “Extremely Likely to Be Using Them” on the upper end.

This second rating question measures the dimension of customer loyalty known as ‘repurchase intent’.

Though the two questions are related, it’s entirely possible a customer can be willing to recommend a brand or product, but not intending to repurchase. The implications of this are significant. Consider, for example, a business such as a health club. The recommendation of a member who intends to remain a member has to be taken as more meaningful than that of a member who is planning to leave.

Create Your Customer Satisfaction Score Using the Average of the Two Ratings

By averaging the ratings from questions (1) and (2) above, a single score can still be created that’s easy to understand and easy to work with — and that’s more reflective of loyal behavior than either of the individual questions alone.

Respondents who rate your brand at a 9 or 10 for both measures should be strong brand advocates. Those providing double ratings at the lower end of the scale, on the other hand, are more likely to exhibit behaviors that reflect a weaker relationship — including exit if and when they find a better alternative.

Adding the extra dimension to your customer satisfaction questionnaire should make your survey findings more robust — without adding undue complexity to your analysis or burden to the respondents answering the survey. I’ve put up a simple example of a satisfaction questionnaire that uses these two questions.

Customer Satisfaction Questionnaire for a Phone Survey

More Satisfaction Questionnaire Articles:

1. Write Your Customer Satisfaction Questionnaire in 30 Minutes
2. Customer Satisfaction Questionnaire for a Phone Survey
3. A Satisfaction Questionnaire Example
4. A Satisfaction Questionnaire for the Paisley Hippo
5. The 3 Satisfaction Survey Questions You Have to Know!