Why Customer Satisfaction Surveys Are The Wrong Tool For Innovation
While customer satisfaction surveys can yield a lot of useful information to improve current offerings for current customers, they cannot discover your best opportunities for innovation and growth. Here’s why:
1. Satisfaction surveys don’t get responses from non-customers
The biggest group of potential customers, non-customers, isn’t even included. That’s a biased sample. Non-customers are choosing a competitor’s offering over yours – why? Your customer satisfaction survey will never help you figure that out. For many companies, the best opportunity for growth is to convert non-customers into customers, so understanding non-customers is paramount.
2. Satisfaction surveys measure satisfaction against the customers’ expectations rather than against what customers want to accomplish
Expectations are the wrong measuring rod for discovering opportunities for innovation. This is because people’s expectations are limited by what they perceive to be reasonable based on their understanding and experience with current solutions. Generally, they are not experts in what is possible; they have no idea. That’s the supplier’s responsibility. As a result, it’s not uncommon for companies to get excellent scores on their customer satisfaction survey only to find some customers defecting to another competitor. How could this be? It’s because the company was delivering excellent service in a narrowly defined area as perceived by the customer, but customers wanted to get other tasks done that they perceived competitors could help them do better.
As suppliers, what we really want to know is how target customers’ (that is, current customers and non-customers) evaluate current offerings compared to what they want to get done in the ideal, not compared to their limited experience and expectations. This provides us with much richer information to guide innovation and growth. This is how leading companies discover market opportunities that customer satisfaction surveys will never uncover.
3. Satisfaction surveys often elicit input that is not actionable
Satisfaction surveys often ask questions that deliver information that is not actionable. I recently completed a restaurant’s customer satisfaction survey that asked me to rate the “Friendliness of employees” on a 1 – 5 scale (with 5 being the highest). Suppose management finds that the restaurant is getting low scores, what should they do? Tell employees to smile more? Visit the tables more frequently? Make small talk? Companies need to determine what they are trying to accomplish with customer feedback and make sure to only ask questions that generate actionable information.
(See my August blog post “How to Master Your Customers’ Experience” to learn more).
