A couple of weeks ago we wrote this post about having the right survey mindset. Most people that we come across who want to create surveys for collecting customer or employee feedback often have to focus some time on coming up with a clear goal for the survey. Knowing the purpose of the survey makes it easier to design and create the survey’s questions. However, after having collected data for a while another challenge may occur: how can the data be used to measure improvement over time?
When you have a large set of collected data you need some way of actually comparing that the data collected today shows and improvement compared to the data collected a month ago (or a deterioration if you’re unlucky). Using something called Satisfaction average can help you achieve exactly this.
Summarized Satisfaction
Satisfaction average is a simple formula that enables you to calculate the average satisfaction for a question. Let’s say you ask your customers:
What did you think of the service in our store?
You let them answer with either of the three options Good, Neither good nor bad or Bad. This is a typical evaluating question, meaning that the answer options are graded.
Each answer option can be translated into a satisfaction percentage, Bad is 0%, Neither good nor bad is 50% and Good is 100%. The satisfactory average gives you a percentage that details the average satisfaction for this question, taken into consideration the number of respondents for each answer option. If the number of respondents for each option are symbolized as:
- x= no. of respondents for Bad
- y= no. of respondents for Not good nor bad
- z = no. of respondents for Good
The formula is written as:
Satisfaction average = (100•(x•0 + y•0.5 + z•1)) / total no. of respondents
In order to illustrate this better, let’s say that 10 persons have responded with Very good, 5 persons have responded with Neither good nor bad and 3 persons have responded with Very bad. In total that gives us 18 respondents.
According to the formula, the satisfaction average is calculated as:
(100•(3*0+5*0.5+10*1) / 18 = 69%
This means that out of the 18 respondents the average satisfaction of the service in the store is 69%, which can be translated to something right in between Good and Not good nor bad.
Improvement Over Time
Calculating the satisfaction average is quite easy when you have the numbers. As mentioned at the beginning of this post the true power of calculating and using the satisfaction average comes when you start comparing it over time. This is when you can start seeing trends in the increase and decrease of the satisfaction average. Hopefully, you can link the changes in the satisfaction average directly to known changes in your business. Otherwise, might the answers to the other questions in your survey help you understand why the satisfaction average has changed over a period of time.
Here at Responster we automatically calculate the satisfaction average for you, so that you can save time and actually focus on using the data. A typical satisfaction average presented at Responster looks like this:
Setting a goal for the satisfaction average is a great way for organizations to measure and evaluate their businesses over time. After just a couple of weeks of collecting data, you can have a primary satisfaction average that you set as your goal to increase, or remain at in the future.
Take care,
Ludvig