AIBS National News

Why waste time surveying your customers about how satisfied they are with your products and services, when research shows that customer engagement is a far more powerful profit driver than satisfaction?

Here’s how you can measure customer engagement and use the responses to boost your profits.

Ask your customers to answer the 11 questions below, (reproduced from Gallup's customer engagement survey, known as CE11), using a five-point scale that measures strength of agreement by scoring 1 for 'strongly disagree' and 5 for 'strongly agree'.

Overall, how satisfied are you with [my business]?

1. How likely are you to continue to choose/repurchase [my business]?
2. How likely are you to recommend [my business] to a friend/associate?
3. [My business] is a name I can always trust.
4. [My business] always delivers on what they promise.
5. [My business] always treats me fairly.
6. If a problem arises, I can always count on [my business] to reach a fair and satisfactory resolution.
7. I feel proud to be a [my business] customer.
8. [My business] always treats me with respect.
9. [My business] is the perfect company for people like me.
10. I can't imagine a world without [my business].

Taken individually, these questions will help you identify ways to improve your relationship with specific customers.

Collectively, the data from all your customers will give you a snapshot of how engaged your clients feel with your business.

Now, you could engage Gallup to analyse your data and compute your customer engagement ratio (the number of your customers who are fully engaged divided by the number who are actively disengaged), but it’s a pretty simple exercise to crunch the numbers yourself.

Use the data from these questions to help you focus on how to increase the engagement of your customers.

Simply look at the areas with the lowest ratings, ask your customers for more feedback and ideas for making improvements in those areas, then set to work implementing the appropriate changes to your business systems and processes.

And don’t forget to continue to measure the results of your customer engagement survey so you can track your progress.

Take action

If you've already got a customer survey, it’s time to take another look at it and assess whether the data you’re gathering is really useful. If not, consider using the CE11 questions instead: they're concise and they'll help you improve the various dimensions of customer engagement.