Frequently companies are concerned about customer satisfaction.

Are customers satisfied with the products and services on offer? It seems a sensible enough concern.

And if you want to find out it’s a good idea to ask, isn’t it?

Many organisations track satisfaction measures, both for their own company’s products or services, and for their competitors. A quantitative tracking study enables satisfaction to be gauged and tracked over time providing a gauge against which company performance can be assessed.

But recent research suggests that measuring satisfaction may not be as useful as you think. It turns out that asking may well be pointless.

If you work for a company that uses customer satisfaction ratings to evaluate your performance you should be very concerned by now!

And if your interested in product evaluation, another area consumer research frequently investigates, you should also be concerned.

Researchers presented research participants with products and asked them to make a choice from the alternatives on offer. They then asked them to rate their satisfaction with the product chosen. (A wide range of different products were included: food processors, lawn mowers, cars, phones, binoculars, pens…).

What the participants didn’t know was that the design of the study manipulated the context of the choice. In some cases people were choosing between two similarly attractive products, other times the choice involved a compromise option, and sometimes one product was much more attractive than the other.

The researchers discovered that the way in which people perceived the product they had chosen was significantly influenced by the options from which they had selected it.

Despite how it feels to us, our satisfaction isn’t an absolute assessment. It’s influenced by what else was available to choose from when we made our choice.

So a respondent completing satisfaction ratings in a survey won’t rate solely on the basis of their experience of the company or its product; they’ll unconsciously adjust their scores because of the other companies being asked about.

Similarly, perceptions of the new product being tested will be influenced by the context in which the product is placed. This could be a context created by preceding questions about particular competitors or the absence of those questions when normally consideration would take place when they’re present.

Equally, if products are being tested against competing products the competitive set selected will influence the outcome.

Yet again, research shows that the answers we get from consumers are not as objective and accurate as we might like to believe.

It does, of course, make complete sense to care about whether your customers are satisfied. But you should be very wary of what research respondents say on the subject. The way in which you ask them will change what they say.

Source: Yoon et al. Choice Set Configuration as a Determinant of Preference Attribution and Strength.  Journal of Consumer Research, 2008; 35 (2): 324 DOI: 10.1086/587630

Image courtesy: Dustin McClure