The Rise of Customer Satisfaction
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Thu, Dec 23, 2010
As Google pursues its mission of making all public knowledge searchable, it has offered a new search tool, the Books Ngram Viewer (ngram being jargon for “word or phrase”). This lets you take a long view on linguistic trends, seeing the usage of phrases across published books over literally centuries.
Covering “just” the last 100 years, the chart below shows the rise in occurrences of customer satisfaction compared to market research and employee satisfaction. This is as a percent of all two-word phrases in books in this Google search engine (i.e., customer satisfaction peaked at 0.0001% of such phrases). Clearly, customer satisfaction has come from nowhere to overtake market research:
This is also an example of how charts can lie. The Books Ngram Viewer defaults to showing some smoothing, which I increased to highlight the trend above, using a rolling 11-year average. With no smoothing, the results show an almost 50% decline in occurrences since the turn of the century:
Since books are written in pursuit of markets (readers), the above charts may be a useful proxy for how interest, or at least perceived interest, in these topics changed over time. Customer satisfaction may have been less important five years ago when customers were plentiful, but the economic downturn will have changed that. Books published on subjects are a lagging indictor of interest; I expect that once the 2010 data sets are uploaded, you will find a rebound in interest in customer satisfaction.
My own career has coincided with the rise in interest in customer satisfaction: the projects I’ve been involved with have shifted from primarily market research to primarily CSAT. It still makes for an interesting divide in the industry, as conversations with some of my peers this week have reminded me; traditional researchers can be dismissive of customer satisfaction as “not real research”. If their sensibilities were formed in the 1970s or earlier, I certainly understand why they feel how they do. But they are missing a growing part of the field that is now as important as general research studies. And Google has indexed the books to prove it.