Customer Priorities: What customers really want

Published 2007.

Customer Priorities: what customers really want explores the reasons why customer satisfaction matters and hence why it should be measured. It improves understanding of customers’ priorities across the UK and Ireland and sets the scene for developing a national Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI).

The research’ found that customers’ top ten priorities in determining their satisfaction are: overall quality of the product or service supplied, friendliness of staff, handling problems and complaints, speed of service, helpfulness of staff, handling enquiries, being treated as a valued customer, competence of staff, ease of doing business and being kept informed.

Robert Crawford, ICS director, said: “This report is a wake-up call for organisations to question misleading customer satisfaction processes and surveys, many of which cover issues of importance to the organisations’ managers rather than those that matter to customers.

“Customers base their evaluation of suppliers on whether they have received the results, outcomes or benefits they were seeking. Customers search for and stay with companies that do best what matters most to customers, so surveys must be based on these same criteria.”

According to the report, different sectors deliver widely varying levels of customer satisfaction. Service businesses, such as hairdressers, household services like decorators and professional services, are best at satisfying customers. The public sector and ex-nationalised industries bring up the rear.

“Service businesses satisfy customers more than organisations in other sectors because they treat people as valued customers, have friendly and helpful staff, offer good overall value for money, handle problems and complaints well and make it easy for customers to do business with them,” said Crawford.

Employee satisfaction is highlighted by the report as typically producing higher levels of customer satisfaction, since more satisfied employees are more highly motivated to give good service. Higher customer satisfaction also produces higher employee satisfaction since employees prefer working for companies that have high levels of customer satisfaction and low levels of problems and complaints.

A large database, based on over 200,000 customer interviews, was consulted to identify the requirements that customers generally regard as most important. To verify the results and to identify the relative importance of these requirements, 2,000 telephone interviews were conducted during November and early December 2005. The interviews represented a demographically representative sample of the adult population of the UK and Ireland.