Millennium Marketing Research®

Tom Schori DBA Millennium Marketing Research®, 808 Ironwood, Normal IL 61761, 309-532-8466

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Determining key 'drivers' for customers, prospects.

By Thomas R. Schori, Ph.D., and Michael L. Garee, Principals,  Millennium Marketing Research^®, 808 E. Ironwood, Normal, IL 61761-5239

Virtually all companies at least have a passing interest in what drives people to purchase--and, equally important, repurchase--their products and services.

Typically, the company will conduct a survey in which respondents are asked to rate, usually on a "1 to 5" or "1 to 10" scale, a certain number of known customer service attributes, e.g., representative courteous, ordering process was easy, etc. Usually, respondents are asked to rate two things: how important each attribute is to them and how well the company met their expectations on each attribute.

On the face of it, this seems like a quite logical approach to surfacing key "drivers" of satisfaction, repurchase, recommendation, etc. The problem is, most respondents will rate so many attributes as being very important to them that the results can be confusing to the company. We recommend taking a slightly different, somewhat unique approach to this problem.

Force respondents to be selective

Starting with the same known customer service attributes, have respondents first rate how important each attribute is to them by forcing them to distribute a specific number of "points" across all attributes. For example, suppose there are 50 attributes being measured. Ask respondents to distribute 50 points among all attributes according to how important they feel any individual attribute is to them. If they think just one attribute far outweighs all other attributes, they would then assign all 50 points to that one attribute. Similarly, if they feel five attributes are the most important to them, then they might assign 10 points to each attribute, etc.

Next, ask respondents to rate how well they think your company is doing in meeting their expectations on each attribute. While respondents may indeed "inflate" or (gasp!) "deflate" scores on this aspect of the survey, you nonetheless will avoid wasting time and money "fixing" things that, from the customers viewpoint at least, aren't all that important to your customers and prospects.