Gap Analysis: Prioritizing Customer Satisfaction Efforts

Gap Analysis: An Easy Tool for Fine-Tuning Your Customer Satisfaction Plan

Over the years, one of the enduring methods for assessing customer satisfaction is an assessment known as a “gap analysis.” For many organizations, assessing customer satisfaction has been used to evaluate the quality of the products and services provided to customers. But not all products and services are equally important. So how do you determine which of your improvement efforts should take the highest priority? A gap analysis can help provide that clarity.

The first step in the process is to ask your customers: Which aspects of our products or services are most important to you? At Riley Research, we typically use a 1-10 scale for that purpose. In our example, the client wanted to understand how customers would rate the relative importance of various metrics, including pricing, resolving problems or inquiries in a timely fashion, billing accuracy, range of services, reliability of services, calls handled by a local representative, and the speed with which a call is answered by a real person.

Next, we asked those customers to rate their satisfaction with the organization, in terms of those same performance measures. To determine the gap between customers’ perceptions of the importance of a measure, and their satisfaction with that measure, we simply subtract the mean rating for performance from the mean rating for importance for each measure.

For example, pricing was rated at 8.8 for importance on a 10-point scale. But pricing received only a 7.4 rating for satisfaction. In this example, the satisfaction “gap” for pricing was 1.4 (8.8 - 7.4), which represented the largest gap among all performance measures tested (see chart below).

The next largest gap was for resolving inquiries in a timely manner (at 1.1), followed by billing accuracy (0.7), range of service (0.5), and reliability (0.4). This analysis provides organizations to understand not just what’s important, but how well they are delivering on each metric, which provides a credible, measurable, and meaningful basis for prioritizing efforts to raise customer satisfaction.

The tool also identified two areas where there was no gap (0.0) for calls answered by a local rep, or a negative gap (-0.2) for the speed of answering a call with a real person. A negative gap indicates that the organization may be overachieving in that area, which may be an indication that fewer resources could be devoted to that area, allowing more resources to be used for other areas with bigger satisfaction gaps.

Ongoing research provides organizations with the opportunity to track changing perceptions about both importance and satisfaction, and gap analyses provide powerful opportunities to rethink priorities, fine-tune budgets, and focus on customer-based solutions.?#Research #GapAnalysis #CustomerSatisfaction #RileyResearch

Gap Analysis Chart: