TABLE OF CONTENTS Probably the most common question that we are asked when presenting our seminar on Customer Satisfaction Measurement is how to improve response rates on postal surveys. For anybody aiming to use this approach to measure customer satisfaction it is a vital question since the problem of non-response bias can invalidate the whole exercise if the response rate is low. Moreover, you should not forget the point of the exercise. Measuring customer satisfaction is not just a matter of carrying out a customer survey, asking a few questions and getting some feedback. It is meant to be a measure, usually one that is monitored over time as a key indicator of organisational performance, so an inaccurate measure is worse than no measure at all.
The generally accepted figure for an 'average' response rate for customer satisfaction surveys by post is 25%, but this masks an extremely wide variation from below 10% to over 90%. Typically, the more important the topic is to the customer, the higher will be the base response rate. For example, a satisfaction survey of new car buyers is likely to generate a higher response rate than a survey by a utility company. In business markets customers are more likely to complete a survey for a major supplier than a peripheral one. For customer satisfaction surveys by post, the average response rate is 25% although it is typically rather higher with business customers and lower with householders.
A response rate below 50% cannot be...
