Nicholas B. Fannings
5/20/2012
GM 588Professor K. Mayberry |
Customer satisfaction has long been an industry focus as a measure of managerial strength and company profitability (Kelsey & Bond, 2001). The satisfaction of the customer is essential to the success of a company. There are many ways for organizations to determine how satisfied their customers are with specific products or services. Although there are, many different ways to measure customer satisfaction industry spanning best practices allow for consistent capturing and interpretation of collected data.
Among the best practices of measuring customer satisfaction, include knowing when to conduct customer satisfaction research and what type of customer satisfaction data to gather. When gathering data for customer satisfaction research, there are two types of surveys to help achieve maximum results and those are, transactional surveys that solicit feedback from the product or service user about that particular encounter (Conklin, 2006). In addition to transactional surveys, there are relationship surveys that collect input from people who have an ongoing relationship with the company and have had multiple transactions (Conklin, 2006).
A second best practice is to determine how many customers to survey or establish the sample size. The third practice is to determine how the survey is to be distributed. The distribution determination is based upon the weather or not a transactional or relationship survey was used to gather data. Methodology to gather data include point of interaction customer surveys, telephone and online surveys.
Designing and effective customer survey is critical when trying to measure the level of satisfaction of customers in an organization. Some of the best practices according to Michael Conklin of Market Tool, Inc. include designing customer surveys include asking about the