I’ve been working with a client for a while to instigate a customer panel they can use to gather feedback.  When the old VP of Marketing dreamed the idea up a few years ago, it seemed like on of those too-good-to-be-true ideas.  Almost instant feedback from customers via short surveys to panelists with a 24 hour turn around.

Well, it took about 3 years to finally come to fruition, but I’m happy to say this client is using their new panel in exactly this way.  And it changes the nature of customer feedback.

VP’s are literally turning to the panel two to three days before important meetings/decisions and getting a pulse on an issue.  It’s usually only a few questions to gauge knowledge of an issue, get some feedback on an idea, etc.  We’re using some sophisticated text analysis tools to mine some of the mroe detailed responses as well.

In this day and age of Social Media and Customer Feedback Loops made possible by new technologies, many people will be asking why this is a big deal?  Well, lots of companies (particularly large ones) weren’t built with these types of feedback loops as part of their DNA.  They need to be manufactured and incorporated into the decision making process.

Manufacturing/creating them is the easy part, getting senior management to take them seriously as trusted sources of customer feedback is difficult.

You can have all the fancy analysis and visualizations you like (and believe me I’ve tried a few), but until you get people trusting the data, none of it will ever work.  Trust is built by time and exposure.  You just have to keep at it and prove consistently that the information is useful and relevant.

It’s great to see it all come together though.

So having just come off a hugely busy week, I finally got around to extending the thought process behind what ‘Satisfaction’ is and how you measure it.

Firstly, I think you have to ignore about 99% of what you find on the Internet regarding Satisfaction research. Most of it is in the form of White Papers written by companies pedaling their ideas. Which aren’t all bad, but don’t really form a body of coherent knowledge.

So I started with mainly academic papers and published books. There are literally a ton of these. And as you go through some of the very early ideas in this space, you get a feel for how thinking has changed over the last 30 years - from the pervasive use of psychological theories of behavior to a more business oriented approach linked closely to a resurgent Loyalty movement.

Not that Loyalty is bereft psychological analysis, but it seems that 30 years ago, when Social Psychology was emerging as a discipline, its application to business and customer interaction was very much in vogue.

One of the themes that kept cropping up, and a good starting point I believe to understanding Satisfaction, is the theory of Cognitive Dissonance (CD).  Or why people ‘lie’ - telling you something that doesn’t necessarily match the experience they just had.

There is a rich history of research on CD.  It began with Leon Festinger and his investigation into the belief persistence of a doomsday cult, and continues with reviews and essays on the 50+ year history of the theory.

Cognitive Dissonance impacts the measurement of Satisfaction because we justify choice.  If I use the same hotel chain, fly the same airline or drive the same model of car week after week or year after year, my behavior tells me something about how I should feel.  I chose to do these things.  No one had a gun at my head.  If I chose them, they must be satisfying.  Why would I choose them otherwise?

Now I am not going to pretend this feeling is robust in the face of bad rooms, awful service or a car breaking down every other day, but it is persistent.  Any time we hold competing, seemingly ‘at odds’ cognition’s, we seek to reduce that tension.  We justify why we use that service/brand.  It can be a story we tell ourselves - I hate the cable company but they have a monopoly - or we convince ourselves we’re more satisfied than we are - that bad service was just a one off, that expensive transmission reconstruction was the price you pay for owning such a cool car.  

These stories are ways to reduce the tension between what we do and feel.  The closer these two are aligned, the more content we are.

This has a tangible effect on how we rate the service we experienced or the product we bought.   But this effect isn’t consistent across all products or services.  Just as research into CD suggests dissonance between your self-view and your behaviours produces the strongest effects (such as making a truthful person lie), lack of emotional or real investment make the effect weak.  I don’t care to justify my pasta sauce purchase if it’s bad, I didn’t invest much time into it anyway.

The upshot of this is that we can ‘lie’ about our level of satisfaction if the time and emotional investment is large enough to make it worthwhile.  

I don’t quite know what this means for the best way to ‘measure satisfaction’ - but I’m thinking it has to be important.