Online Customer Attitude Surveys

From QualtricsWiki

Attribute surveys of customers have long been used in business and marketing to predict behaviors, such as intention to purchase a specific brand or product.

More importantly, attitude measurement is central to developing customer satisfaction measures and surveys, and to explaining changing levels of customer satisfaction.

The greatest business use of attitude surveys has been in the areas of product and service research (including customer surveys, packaging design surveys, branding surveys, and advertising surveys). Other frequent uses include website surveys, developing service policies, choosing company and trade names, and measuring employee attitudes.

Multi-attribute Attitude surveys often focus on surveys about many dimensions of product or service such as product attribute and service quality categories:

[edit] Product Attribute Categories

• Performance
• Durability
• Conformance to Specifications
• Attributes and Features
• Name
• Reliability
• Serviceability
• Fit and Finish

[edit] Service Quality Categories

• Tangibles (facilities, equipment, personnel, communications material)
• Reliability (dependable, accurate performance)
• Responsiveness (willingness to help, prompt service)
• Assurance (trust, confidence, knowledge, and courtesy)
• Empathy (caring, individualized attention)

These attitude measures can be developed into questions, measured in a variety of different ways:

1. Measures of Attitude: Quantitative Measures
   • Delays, waiting time, number of phone calls, visits and interviews for solving or dealing with problems, precision or correctness in performance of tasks.
2. Measures of Attitude: Qualitative Measures
   • Aesthetic aspects of the organization, environmental cues, hygiene, security, organizational ambiance, friendliness, comfort, convenience, interpersonal relation level.
3. Measures of Attitude Toward System Related Issues
   • Response to expected and unexpected demands, attitude to representative providing the service, length of a given service, waiting-delay rate, complaints and feedback, help and problem resolution system.
4. Measures of Attitude Toward Service Representative
   • Nature, timing and escalation of customer-representative communication, ability to solve problem, knowledge of problem, service reliability, promptness of problem resolution, satisfaction level obtained, competence of the representative.

Scaling of attitude questions and measures is largely a function of what you are trying to find out and how you want to report it. The examples below show a variety of different approaches to measuring and reporting service quality.

• By Statistical Analysis: What is the percentage of clients complaining about a given problem?
• By Quantification: Time, delays, slowness are key measures. For example, what is the average waiting time for a customer service call or to receive problem resolution?
• By the Effects: Is the problem resolved, is the service is satisfactory, was the information useful, was the solution delivered on time, was the solution convenient?
• By the Attitudes: Were service representatives attentive, careful, polite, kind, helpful, and courteous?
• By Observable Behavior: What was the speed of service, were our representatives qualified, competent, and honest?
• By Comparatives: Do we have a high relative value, better than average service, or offer more than provided by the market leader?
• By Degree of Satisfaction: How do our customers feel - highly satisfied, medium, unsatisfied, etc.?
• By Cost: What is the final cost of service?
• By Loyalty: How many clients discontinue or return for service?
• By Content: What is the analysis of customer feedback and complaints?

[edit] Brief Introduction Attitude Measurement Theory

Click here Attitude is generally considered to be a two-part concept that, when measured, involves attitude direction and attitude intensity.

Direction is the evaluative component and reflects performance on a given dimension. Direction is often measured using 5 point Likert scales that range from Delight to Failure, Like to Dislike, or Excellent to Poor.

Intensity of attitude is the importance component and reflects the fact that some attitudes are held more strongly than others. Importance is often measured using a 5 point Likert scale that ranges from Very Important to Not at all Important.

The key to proper measurement of attitudes is to combine the evaluation and importance measures in a multiplicative fashion so that the importance scores weight the evaluation measures.

The most common attitude measurement models define the relationship between behavior and attitude as being a multi-attribute attitude model, expressed as:

where:

w1, w2 = weights that indicate the relative influence of the overall attitude toward the object and the normative influence to purchase the product

ai * bi = the overall attitude toward the object. The overall attitude is formed by the multiplicative product of ai (the person's evaluation of attribute i), and bi (here defined as the importance of attribute i in the purchase decision). The sum is taken over the k attributes that are defined as salient in the purchase decision.

For example:

nbi * mci = The overall normative component of the decision process. This is computed as the multiplicative product of nbi (the norms governing attitude i), and mci (the motivation of the respondent to comply with those norms).

For example: The normative component is often considered to be absorbed in the overall attitude component and depending on the application, is often ignored.

There are variant forms of the multi-attribute attitude model, each measuring slightly different constructs (value and importance, affect and belief, performance and importance, acceptability and importance, etc.), and each using slightly different scales or combinations of scales (5, 7, 10 point Likert scale, semantic differential scale, constant sum scale, etc.).