Improvement Actions and the Importance Satisfaction Model

In order to raise the value of customer satisfaction where through a customer satisfaction index or in percentage you need to focus on the areas that requires improvement and maintains the areas of excellence. In an ideal situation with unlimited budgets each company would be able to focus entirely on every aspect of their business at each point in time to increase customer satisfaction. Since we never deal with ideal situations it would be worth while to tackle the headaches and maintain high satisfaction levels in areas that your client base is already ecstatic with. To correctly establish business operations to focus improvements you can utilize an importance satisfaction model.

Importance satisfaction models are divided up into four quadrants representing four areas of your business. On the x-axis is the importance level as established by the client base and on the y-axis is the level of satisfaction for each attribute. To divide up the model into the four quadrants, the customer satisfaction median is used as the central point dividing the y-axis while the median of the importance levels is used as the central point dividing the x-axis.

Four quadrants can be defined as follows:

Excellent

Attributes located in this area are ranked high in importance and high in satisfaction. It is the responsible of the company to maintain these levels of satisfaction to keep the client coming back and hopefully refer new a couple of new clients in.

Improvement

The work begins now to get this area improved. This quadrant contains all attributes with high importance but low satisfaction levels which in turn affects total customer satisfaction results and will impede a company’s growth.

Surplus

Clients are highly satisfied with these attributes, but don’t view them as being important. The performance of the company within this area will exceed the client’s expectation and should of course be maintained.

Fix, but don’t fret

These are attributes with low satisfaction and low importance. Companies don’t have to pay to much attention to these attributes as client’s don’t view them as being important, however client’s will also be pleasantly surprised by improvements in this area.
Our four quadrants make up the model and is a useful tool to guide management to make decisions on the business operations to focus effort and resources. During times where cost reductions are required management can turn to the surplus area.

As with most models there are considerations that have to be taken into account. I will outline them here and focus on each one in later posts.

1.  It is up for debate if customers can correctly identify importance levels for each attribute. When asked an importance level for several attributes what client would not want to indicate that each one is important. You have my business now focus on everything. While not all clients take this approach it is still a situation that occur. On the flip side of having clients indicate importance levels you can use various regression models to put together derived importance levels.

2.  Since the survey is conducted using ordinal scales (Very satisfied, Not satisfied etc.) it is also debatable whether you can represent the median for satisfaction or importance results as a definitive number.

An area that I will examine will be utilizing sliding scales within surveys, which may fix this issue.

3.  After the model is complete and the four quadrants are established will it then be wise to focus efforts on attributes with the To Be Improved section with higher importance levels or lower satisfaction levels?

Within the subsequent pots I will focus on these areas within the importance satisfaction model, but at the same time it is ready to be utilized by management.