Stop Wasting Money on Satisfaction Research!

If your company is like most, you hire market research firms to steal precious time from your customers with their ineffective surveys. What are the customers satisfied with? What are their grievances? Maybe you pass out comment cards or questionnaires as well. At large companies, the whole operation may cost in the millions.

And what’s it worth? I have to be blunt: not very much. Sure, everyone has the right intentions, but it’s results that count—and most customers today are not very impressed with their suppliers. In fact, most wouldn’t even recommend the companies they buy from to a friend or colleague. If conventional satisfaction surveys worked, would most companies have net promoter scores that hover just above zero?

To explain all the reasons why the standard approach to customer satisfaction fails would take at least a book chapter—and it just so happens I can recommend one, Chapter 5 of The Ultimate Question. In the best tradition of late-night comedy, it lists the Top Ten reasons satisfaction surveys fail.

But here are two of the fundamental flaws in surveys. One is that they seldom produce accurate, useful information.

Think about it. Who takes the time to respond to a satisfaction survey? Market researchers jump up and down with excitement when 10 or 20 percent of customers bother to respond (remember, that means the other 80 or 90 percent resent this time-wasting foolishness). The only customers who respond are bored, lonely, or angry about some unresolved gripe. Are these people representative of your customer base? More important, do they represent your best customers, the ones you most want to keep happy?

A bank, for example, surveyed its customers and found that many were dissatisfied with long lines at the branches. Fortunately, one manager probed deeper and learned that the bank’s most profitable customers didn’t really care about that, since they seldom visited a branch. They were much more interested in things like rapid problem-solving by knowledgeable phone reps.

The second flaw is that satisfaction surveys aren’t operational. The researchers gather and analyze the data, then make recommendations to senior management—recommendations that may or may not be implemented. Line managers, the ones who must cope with whatever dissatisfaction customers may feel, rarely get timely, useful feedback.

Nor do the surveys solve customers’ problems. And that makes customers madder than ever. They report a grievance to the researcher, thinking they might at least get an apology from the company if not a solution to their problem. But of course nothing happens—their grievance is just one more anonymous data point in the researchers’ report.

So stop wasting money (and your customers’ precious time) on these surveys. Instead, ask your customers the Ultimate Question, systematically and regularly, and provide timely, granular data to your line managers. Executed correctly, a one-or-two-question UQ survey will draw responses from 80 or 90 percent of customers—and most will welcome a follow-up call from the front-line managers who can actually solve their problem.