Years ago there was a big controversy among researchers and consultants about the efficacy of using customer satisfaction measures to assess the effectiveness of sales campaigns or to compare different sales groups. The debate is similar to the one about employee commitment versus employee engagement. The argument was that customer satisfaction was a nice-to-know attitude but that it was not really tapping into the behaviors that drive success.
The good news is that today much of the controversy is really semantic. Most surveys that claim to measure customer satisfaction also measure likely behaviors such as likelihood to recommend, likelihood to purchase again in the future, etc.
The bottom line is that a survey, or any other measurement, must give us information that really tells us how successful we are and really tells us what to do to get better.
http://www.segherssurveyconsulting.com
Good Morning Ray;
I hear you. I do recall “Satisfaction” measures, as I used them my self. And, while we always didn’t survey specific satisfiers and (dis)satisfiers (while they were delineated by some investigators), we were sometimes able to correlate high and low satisfaction with specific conditions which we did survey. I did this in my”Team Building for New Business” thesis (1965), and also discussed Satisfaction in a “Morale Recommendation” for a major auto Product Development group (about 1993).
Thinking back to the discussions (about satisfaction) you are referring to, the name Scott Myers, at Texas Instruments, comes to mind. I think he wrote a paper about “Marketing Myopia” and it was in the Scientific American magazine. And, also I think Hertzberg at WRU (Western Reserve, now Case Western) may have authored regarding the subject.
Our current focus on Engagement for Excellence I believe is more directional correct, and provides a better channel to be sure that there is the right stuff and things don’t go wrong. In my opinion, you are paralleling the path to establish the concept to customer, and customer satisfactions so much desired by organizations today,
But, perhaps engagement relates more to product delivery, while satisfactions relates more to the questions of customer insight, market research, and happy customers who are pleased and brag about their purchases. It all about bartering and exchanging services, and customers want a good deal.
By: Bill LeGray on March 28, 2011
at 11:58 am