Standardize Your Customer Satisfaction Questions & Rating Scales
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Jun 08, 2009
One of the reasons your organization may need enterprise feedback management is to standardize on the same question wording and scale across your products, departments and divisions. Whichever measures you decide are best for your organization, use them consistently. You want to be able to compare your Net Promoter Scores®, your ACSI Scores, your CSAT scores, your Apostle Models to one another. This will enable you to compare and contrast different parts of the business. Internal benchmarking can help your different groups learn from one another.
Sad to say, such standardization is the exception rather than the rule. In a review of 29 customer-satisfaction questions used by one Vovici partner, we identified eight different scales in use with nine different ways of wording the question:
| Occurrences |
Question Wording |
| 13 |
How would you rate your company's satisfaction with... |
| 6 |
Please rate your satisfaction with... |
| 4 |
How satisfied are you with... |
| 3 |
How would you describe your level of satisfaction with... |
| 1 |
Please indicate your level of satisfaction with... |
| 1 |
Please describe your satisfaction with... |
| 1 |
In general how would your describe your level of satisfaction with... |
| Occurrences |
Scale |
| 12 |
1 (Poor) - 6 (Excellent) |
| 5 |
1 (Not Satisfied) - 5 (Very Satisfied) |
| 4 |
1 (Not At All Satisfied) - 5 (Extremely Satisfied) |
| 4 |
Very Dissatisfied, Dissatisfied, Somewhat Dissatisfied, Somewhat Satisfied, Satisfied, Very Satisfied, No Opinion |
| 1 |
Very Dissatisfied, Dissatisfied, Neither Satisfied Nor Dissatisfied, Satisfied, Very Satisfied |
| 1 |
1 (Extremely Unsatisfied) - 5 (Extremely Satisfied) |
| 1 |
Extremely Dissatisfied, Slightly Dissatisfied, Neither Satisfied Nor Dissatisfied, Slightly Satisfied, Extremely Satisfied |
| 1 |
1 - 4 [no labels specified!] |
Ironically, not a single rating scale followed the best practices of not showing numbers, of labeling each point and of using five points for unipolar scales and seven points for bipolar scales.
For individual groups that are reluctant to switch to the standard measure, allow them to run the new metrics alongside the old for a period of time so that they can understand the relationship between the two measures. Some Vovici clients have run the old and new methods side by side for a year, only retiring the old measure once year-over-year comparisons could be provided on the new measure.
Then your staff can say, "Measure by measure, what's mine is yours, and what is yours is mine." Well, at least the English majors can, and they were probably never too fond of the old numbers anyway.