The 4 Steps to Measure Customer Satisfaction along the Customer Journey (Part 2: Hypotheses)

Here comes part 2 (out of 4) of an article about how to measure the satisfaction of your customers in order to make it actionable. If you haven't done so, I recommend to read first part 1 "Match your Areas of Influence with the Customer Journey"

Develop Hypotheses about your Customer Satisfaction Drivers

One of the basic approaches of market research is to test hypotheses and to find out whether they can be falsified or whether they are found to be true until further falsification attempts. We apply this thinking also in this concept. Therefore, in the second step, you will derive hypotheses from the Customer Experience relevant contributions of each of the above-mapped teams or business functions.

Either you are close enough to their missions, operations and output to come up with a few suggestions yourself, before putting them up for discussion. Or you go into brief structured workshops with brainstorming, focus groups, interviews, card sorting etc. to find out what they believe what customers expect from them to deliver, and how. This is a permissible way as long as you strictly follow the idea that these are hypotheses that you want to test against the customers' opinions.

In product management and other disciplines, it has become very common to formulate service and product requirements into user stories that explain from the point of view of a user what he wants a specific feature to provide and how it should function. Also, in our case here, writing hypotheses in the style of user stories, helps to formulate expectations strictly through the eyes of the customer. Therefore, I recommend starting every hypothesis with "I, as a customer, ..."

Let's look at our "One-time purchase" journey and at a few examples.

• For "comparison": I, as a customer, want ads within my search result list to be marked clearly. I ... want results to indicate to which extend my filter settings apply. I ... want to perform an in-depth comparison between results selected by me.
• For "service": I, as a customer, want to be informed pro-actively about each status change of my order. I ... want to customize my notifications. I ... want to see any status change in my customer account. I ... expect information to be available and consistent across all service channels.

As a result, you will gather a huge number of customer requirements, or hypotheses, within a short time. Collect really all that comes in your mind, as this is not yet the time to discuss their impact or even their validity. Make sure that you moderate the collection process in a way that not just current pain points but also assumed strengths make it on the list. In case you seek for inspiration on how to achieve this, Creative Problem Solving is a great source of techniques about diverging thoughts instead of narrowing down ideas too early in the process.

These hypotheses are not yet confirmed to be true, or even to be the most relevant. They are just the basis for what you will discuss with your customers in the first step. You will see later how to prioritise your hypotheses, how to discard some of them and why you will continue developing new ones.

Read next

Part 3: Translate Hypotheses into Concrete Questions (coming soon)

Part 4: Compile Purposeful Questionnaires (coming soon)

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You want to get it all in one complete picture? Develop an executive approach? Discuss any details? Please feel free to send me a direct message or leave a comment below. And please "like" and share this article!

About

Jochen Ga?ner is the Vice President of Operations at the comparison portal Verivox. Recently he worked as Executive Vice President of Customer Advocacy, Senior Vice President Corporate Development and Vice President of Product Management at Avira and other companies. He is passionate about customer experience, digitalisation and creating truly valuable products and services.