Customer priorities: what customers really want (2006)

Description

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.

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.