Back to basics: Are they getting satisfaction?

Customer satisfaction is less touchy-feely and more scientific than we might think. It is key to business success and should be a principal consideration when you are putting together your business strategy.

Some pubs are making common mistakes when monitoring their customer satisfaction, which means they may not be getting a true reflection of the results. And should they act on false information, their decisions may not be beneficial for the business.

Usually, the mistakes that are made when measuring customer satisfaction are due to lack of understanding of how customer satisfaction works and are easily avoidable.

At The Leadership Factor we have compiled a "Scientific Seven" list of advice and tips to provide pubs and bars with some help towards measuring how happy or unhappy their customers really are.

They provide some of the rules that can produce a customer satisfaction measure that genuinely reflects how customers feel and therefore provide a sound basis for making business decisions.

Ultimately, it's worth pubs, bars, restaurants - any venue - spending the time and resource getting their customer satisfaction measurement right in such a competitive marketplace. Improving customer satisfaction leads to customers coming back for more, spending more and recommending you to their friends.

Nigel Hill, author and expert on customer satisfaction, is founder of The Leadership Factor which measures customer satisfaction for an array of blue chip organisations including Chelsea FC, Tesco, Direct Line and Visa

1. Measure importance as well as satisfaction​

Customer satisfaction is about the extent to which an organisation has met its customers' requirements. So don't just ask customers how satisfied they are, measure the first half of the equation too - what are your customers' requirements and how important are they?

For instance, choice and quality of wines will be more important at some pubs than others, as will other factors such as speed of service, décor, ambience and music.

Satisfying customers is all about "doing best what matters most to customers" - there's little point being great at something that's not important to them.

2 Ask the right question​

Many companies ask the wrong questions because they base their survey on the "lens of the organisation" - filling the survey with the questions they want to ask. For an accurate reflection of how satisfied or dissatisfied customers feel your survey should be based on the factors customers use to judge you. So don't avoid difficult questions such as the price of the beer or about things you might regard as given, like the quality of beverages and snacks. If you do, the survey will be meaningless and won't tell you whether customers are going to be more or less loyal in the future.

3. Scientific samples​

For accuracy a sample of at least 200 customer responses is necessary, and sampling must be completely random.

If you have more than one pub you should survey at least 50 customers from each venue.

4. Representative response rate​

Many businesses make impulsive business decisions based on satisfaction surveys with a low response rate, that is, below 20 per cent. This minority of customers who responded will not be the same as the 80 per cent that didn't take part.

It is proven that minority respondents will provide more extreme answers. Many of them will be habitual complainers and others can be "bad-fit" customers - people whose needs are not met by what your pub does. Making decisions on this information means you would be trying to make the pub better for the kind of customers you may be better off without, possibly making things worse for the customers you most want to attract!

Leaving cards or questionnaires for customers to take and fill in if they feel like it is the worst possible way to do a survey. You'll be lucky if one per cent take part and the information produced will be meaningless. People should also be interviewed individually, not as a group, so personal interviews in the heat of the moment at the venue will not be reliable either.

Some food-led venues very wisely build a customer database which is a priceless loyalty tool in itself. If you have one the best way to do a customer satisfaction survey is to mail them a questionnaire at home with a reply-paid envelope.

If you don't already have a database you can "recruit" customers in the bar, collecting their phone numbers for a later telephone interview - but be careful to set quotas to ensure that you recruit a representative sample.

5. Double questions​

Questions which are really two questions, such as "Were the barstaff friendly and helpful?" can be impossible to answer and can often not be useable. The barstaff may have been extremely friendly and no help whatsoever.

6. Focus on a few priorities for improvement​

The main purpose of customer satisfaction surveys is to help businesses improve. For this, the survey results must clearly sign-post opportunities for improvement that could provide the best return on investment for the business.

It is also proven that improving customer satisfaction is more effectively achieved by focusing efforts on one large satisfaction gap rather than by making lots of small improvements.

And don't forget that customer satisfaction is based on customers' perceptions, so sometimes improving customer satisfaction is about changing their perceptions rather than changing the product.

We once worked with a chain of bars where the main priorities for improvement came out as "quality of the beer". Over the following year the actual quality stayed exactly the same - it was from the same brewery, stored at the same temperature and the pipes were already spotlessly clean.

What the company did do, however, was introduce a strong communications campaign backed up by point-of-sale material to focus customers on what the bars were doing to deliver superb quality beer. When surveyed a year later, customer satisfaction with quality of the beer shot up and overall they were much more satisfied and loyal.

7. Provide feedback​

Customers don't always notice the improvements made by organisations so it pays to tell them. Even better if you can link improvements to what customers told you when you did the customer survey. That shows you're really customer-focused. It also shows that it's worth taking part in the survey because it does make a difference - and if you succeed in improving customer satisfaction it's great public relations.