"Marketers have long appreciated that surveys engage people; a single yes-or-no question on a direct-mail envelope can induce them to look inside. But can a company survey influence customers' loyalty or buying habits? Research over the past two decades has shown that it can, but the studies have been narrow-looking at how surveys affect attitudes in the short term or influence one-time behavior, like a single purchase. We set out to study the scope of this survey effect, and we were astonished by what we found.
We conducted a field experiment with over 2,000 customers enrolled in the customer relationship program of a large U.S. financial services company. One randomly selected group of 945 people participated in a single, ten- to 12-minute telephone survey investigating customer satisfaction. During the call, they were asked to rate various features of the program, like estate planning, account monitoring, and retirement planning. At the call's end, they were asked to rate their overall satisfaction with the company; most said they were highly satisfied. A second group of 1,064 randomly selected customers wasn't surveyed and served as the control. We tracked these two groups for a full year, measuring their purchasing behavoir, defection rates, and profitability. Neither group received any direct marketing from the company for the duration of the study.
We conducted a field experiment with over 2,000 customers enrolled in the customer relationship program of a large U.S. financial services company. One randomly selected group of 945 people participated in a single, ten- to 12-minute telephone survey investigating customer satisfaction. During the call, they were asked to rate various features of the program, like estate planning, account monitoring, and retirement planning. At the call's end, they were asked to rate their overall satisfaction with the company; most said they were highly satisfied. A second group of 1,064 randomly selected customers wasn't surveyed and served as the control. We tracked these two groups for a full year, measuring their purchasing behavoir, defection rates, and profitability. Neither group received any direct marketing from the company for the duration of the study.
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Asking your customers their opinion can greatly increase customer loyalty. |
A year after the survey was conducted, the customers we surveyed were more than three times as likely to have opened new accounts, were less than half as likely to have defected, and were more profitable than the customers who hadn't been surveyed. These differences reached their maximum levels several months after the survey was done and persisted throughout the year. Even at the end of the year, surveyed customers continued to open new accounts at a faster rate and defect at a slower rate than the people in the control group.
How could ten minutes on the phone lead to these broad, sustained effects? Several theories of consumer psychology might apply. The simplest is that satisfaction surveys appeal to customers' desire to be coddled, reinforcing positive feelings they may alrady have about the surveying organization and making them more likely to buy its products. Surveys may also increase people's awareness of a company's products and thereby encourage future purchases. More subtle is the idea that the very process of asking people their opinions can induce them to form judgements that otherwise wouldn't occur to them-that they really do like a company's estate-planning services, for example. These so-called measurement-induced judgements, the theory holds, can influence later behavior..."
Paul M. Dholakia is an assistant professor of management at Rice University's Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management in Houston. Vicki G. Morwitz is an associate professor of marketing at New York's University's Stern School of Business in New York.
Copyright 2002 - Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. |
