Five Good Practices in the Development of Customer Experience Questionnaires

The elaboration of questionnaires has been facilitated by the variety of software available, particularly in the case of online questionnaires. These softwares give a false feeling of ease and which leads to making several mistakes.

Qmetrics considers this activity to be critical in studies evaluating the experience of both customers and employees, for which it pays the utmost attention. Five rules, classified as good practices, are in particular adopted.

1. Define precisely the objectives of the questionnaire

Before preparing the questionnaire, it is essential to define its objectives, that is, what type of analysis and use will be given to the survey results. The questionnaire must be focused on these objectives. Only under these conditions will such a questionnaire allow the intended analyzes to be carried out and there will be no secondary questions that unnecessarily lengthen the time needed to answer, drastically reducing response rates.

2. Use of scientific methodologies in the design of the questionnaire

The questions must be well prepared by specialists so as not to raise doubts or bias in the interviewee. It is presented below. two types of frequent errors.

A frequently made mistake is not to respect unidimensionality. For example, the customer is asked to evaluate, in the same question, the friendliness and competence of the employee who attended him. The answer will be an average value, vague and of little use because how to classify, for example, someone who is competent but not friendly. The solution would be to use two questions.

Another frequent mistake has to do with response categories that are unclear and precise. So in a questionnaire that seeks to find out how often customers buy a given product or service, it is quite common to use the following response options: never, occasionally, sometimes, often and regularly. The problem is that these categories are vague and have a different meaning from individual to individual as is the case, for example the category "sometimes". One way to avoid this confusion but perhaps less intuitive is to use a numerical scale in which the ends of the scale have a concrete meaning. For example, using a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 means never and 10 means regularly.

3. Use of an appropriate scale

The scale must have granularity to allow adequate discrimination. For reasons explained in another post “What is the ideal number of points on an evaluation scale?”, Qmetrics considers that the ten-point scale is the most appropriate.

4. Measure what's really important

What seems important to the customer is not necessarily what should be measured. What should be measured is what impacts the customer's decisions. A good example of this possible divergence is given by security in an airline. If customers are asked to rank the attributes of an airline that they consider most important, they will, with a high probability, place security at the top of the hierarchy. However, in the vast majority of cases, safety is not one of the most important attributes in the customer's decision to choose an airline.

Other factors take precedence in the choice of the company, such as the price, the compliance with the schedules or even the quality of the meals. Security is seen as a requirement that is met by all companies and is therefore not a differentiating factor. A much better way to identify drivers of customer loyalty is to empirically identify elements of the customer experience that impact behavior and that allow you to predict changes in customer behavior when these elements are improved. It is about using explanatory models of customer behavior that allow explaining the impacts on the choice of the airline of changes in variables such as price, schedule, loyalty programs.

Using this approach of derived importance instead of declared importance still has the advantage of reducing the size of the questionnaires. In fact, in the case of declared importance, the client was first asked to classify the attributes and then to rank the same attributes. which doubles the size of the questionnaire.

5. Measure the entire customer experience

The best customer experience programs are those that identify the elements of the customer experience that positively impact the organization's results, increasing repurchase and recommendation behaviors. The customer experience program must therefore identify the areas that need investment, which does not necessarily correspond to the areas with the lowest scores. To achieve this goal, it is essential to measure the entire customer experience, namely the factors that contributed to a better experience as well as those that contributed to a negative experience.