汇聚全网市场资讯

Based on current market trend, increasingly more companies begin to conduct MS study, but also many ones can’t or don’t know how to effectively use the data they acquired from research. It’s largely due to some ambiguous questions or options in questionnaires. These questions can’t clearly states the differences between the targeted company and its competitors, and of the same service provided, what are the advantages and deficiencies of the company. There’re many standards and rules applied to measure customer satisfaction. But in practical application, they all possess a certain degree of limitation and flaws. Now let’s take a further step to better understand it.  

Performance scales provide consumers with lots of options that can express their opinions on services received. The options are simply some adjectives, such as “excellent”, “Okay”, “Ordinary”, “Not Good”, “Unacceptable”, etc. but the problem is all these standards are quite general and ambiguous, and can’t clearly express customer evaluation on service quality. Therefore, many consumers have to “generously” choose options that are superior to the actual service they received. Especially when there’s no unpleasantness happened in the process, customers tend to choose the better evaluation, which makes the survey result inaccurate. All of them will lead to the result inconsistency between comprehensive assessment and the actual service status.  

With satisfaction scales, consumers are able to rank service or product quality according to their satisfaction degree. In questionnaire, there’re different options of satisfaction degree, e.g. “Very Satisfied”, “Acceptable”, etc. But the problem lies in the similar ranking of satisfaction degree and service performance of employees--- consumers will give them both high scores due to the same reason. In order to decrease inaccuracy, few neutral options existed in questionnaires, while consumers with neutral attitude always choose positive options rather than negative ones. As a result, the research result out of satisfaction scales is also inaccurate.  

Comparison scales between customer satisfaction expectation and actual status are different from the above-mentioned two. This method is to make comparison between consumer expectations with their actual feeling after service, and draw conclusion out of it. The questionnaire will include options as “Significantly above Expectation”, “Above Expectation”, “Same as Expectation”, “Below Expectation”, and “Significantly below Expectation”. Though these options are quite accurate, the differences among customer expectation make them insignificant. Many evaluations are based on positive or negative expectation, and even most of them are likely to cause confusions due to their ambiguity. Besides, because of the huge variance lies in expectations among different consumer groups, this large-scale measurement method will be more complex once new customers are added in. In general, new consumers might expect more, while current ones have clearer views of their expectations. Thus, one can’t combine the two together, and they’re also not comparable to each other. Another problem of this method is once the result shows that the ranking is improved, we can hardly know if it’s the result of expectation change or enhancement of employee service quality, which increase the uncertainty and decrease the feasibility of this method.  

Another method is desire scales, and it has two forms. One is similar to the last one. Consumers rank services or products based on comparison between expectation and actual status. The ranking is from “Above Expectation” to “Significantly below Expectation”. This kind of method is more effective. The other form is a more detailed version of the first one. Consumers will give ranking based on frequencies that their needs are satisfied, which ranks from “Have never been satisfied”, “Rarely Satisfied”, “Sometimes Satisfied”, “Most time Satisfied”, “Usually Satisfied”, and “Never Let Me Down”. However, this method can only be applied to multiple consumptions.  

All the above-mentioned sales share a common weakness, which is they can’t reflect which link in service or which product needs to improve. Managers’ job is to guess from these ambiguous evaluations the actual aspects need to improve, and what fields consumers complain about. However, this speculation is always inaccurate and without sufficient basis. In fact, the best way is to communicate with customers and listen to their suggestions. There’re many ways to achieve this, the most effective one is also the simplest one, which is already successfully applied in business and education fields.    

According to this method, in the sub-questionnaire, three options under each item can be listed as “No Place Needs to Improve”, “Need Some Improvement” and “Need Huge Improvement” based on service progress. This kind of scale is easy to understand, and clearly marked which parts need to improve and the degree of improvement. Besides, the three options are clear and obvious, which help customers easily make choice that’s closest to their opinions. Meanwhile, consumers are able to efficiently finish high quality questionnaire. Although there’re neutral options and may induce customers to make choice, they still reflect actual needs of companies. Therefore, the study result avoids any “mercy” displayed by customers as previous scales.  

The range of application of this kind of scales system is wider, and it’s almost applicable for all services and products. However, its deficiency lies in the incapability of evaluation on activity repetition frequency, such as opinions of audience towards performance sequence. However, with its many advantages, this tiny deficiency is almost nothing, and the selection can be decided by management level.

In many cases, contractors are not allowed to visit the same store twice .

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