This latest release includes the ability to hide/show questions, publish your survey in 7 new languages, run weighted frequency distributions, add multiple validation fields prior to starting a survey, and display choices with a scrollable list.

Enhancements:

• Hide/Show questions provides the ability to not display a question based on an integrated data field. For example, if my customer base contains segments, I can ask specific questions to each segments.
• 7 New Languages: create your survey in multiple languages and store all responses in one database. New languages include: Chinese, Polish, Hindi, Russian, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic.
• Weighted Frequencies: Use the choice weights you assign and create weighted frequency distribution charts.
• Multiple Validation Fields: Create multiple “passwords” to your survey. Upload a spreadsheet and have the survey taker enter for example a username and passord, or employee id, name, and key.
• Scrollable List: Ability to display choices from a multiple-choice multiple-answer question as a scrollable list. Great when your list of choices is veeery long.

Fixes:

• Support for Latin characters on dashboards
• Second time one exports a chart was not working
• When hitting back on an integrated survey
• Migrate database to UTF-8
• Charts not displaying on Weighted Average Analysis

Most of the customer satisfaction surveys and products that you are likely to come across in the market are likely to have complicated algorithms for calculating the customer satisfaction index. But in all this ‘big’ talk, you are likely to get none of the company professionals to explain the specific analysis that is used to arrive at the customer satisfaction index. This is mainly because these customer satisfaction products are created by third parties. The whole thing is covered up by saying that it is a ‘black box’ and that they are not allowed to give out the details of the calculation.

While some of the customer satisfaction models actually use good partial correlations and regressions to arrive at the factors that are important in driving customer satisfaction indices, the fact is that the overall satisfaction is merely always a weighted average of the top four or five questions about the product quality, experience, differentiation, recommendation or loyalty.

It is therefore best to be able to calculate the satisfaction index with the knowledge of the elements that go into it. In addition to that, a programs or algorithms that allow you to set the weights based on the needs of your specific industry are better.

The Mineful Customer Satisfaction Index
The Mineful Satisfaction Index is calculated in a simple manner. It takes in a total of at most 5 questions. As a user you can enter the weight that you want to attach to the specific question. For example, you may choose to have the following questions at an overall level for the customer satisfaction index and the corresponding weights.

Based on the customer responses that are received, each response is allotted a value of the rating scale minus one times the question weight.
The sum of this for all the question is then scaled to produce a 100-point index. See formula below and an example for one response.

The overall customer index is then calculated by adding the weighted average responses and then scaling it
to 100-point scale. The weights are automatically standardized to add up to 1. See final calculation below:
(100/7)((7-1)*.25 + (5-1)*.35 + (1-1)*.15 + (6-1)*.15) = 52.14

The Mineful software allows you to create this customer satisfaction index at the click of a button. It can allow you to trend the indices over time and plot them so that you can see how your company is doing over time. In addition to that you can also calculate the customer satisfaction index for different segments like males, younger customers and the like to understand the customers better.

If you know the specific factors that have gone into calculating the customer satisfaction index, you will know what you need to do to take corrective action. With the knowledge about the specific aspect that you need to work on, you can create retention strategies to ensure that you do not lose customers. For example, if the customer satisfaction index is low because the customers are seeing your product or service as a ‘me too’ then you need to ensure that you create some sort of differentiation (real or perceived) in the minds of the customers. Alternately, if there is low satisfaction with the product, you may have to go back on the bench and try and come up with some innovative variants with more resources allocated in research and development.

While a lot is talked about the team, the product and the market, the cost of acquiring a customer is often forgotten. Many people therefore do not calculate the customer acquisition cost that they incur on a regular basis. If you were to calculate this, you would know just how important it is to ensure great customer satisfaction so that the overall customer experience is good, leading to better retention.

The Importance of Customer Retention
If you calculate the numbers properly, you will see the amount of resources that you spend in terms of acquiring a customer. This will lead you to understand that importance of customer retention because a retained customer is likely to give you regular business (the regularity of which depends on the niche that you are in). The process of understanding why customers leave and developing a program to prevent it becomes urgent and necessary.

Developing a Customer Retention Program
To ensure customer retention you have to understand that business cannot be done on a transactional basis anymore. You need to ensure that what you really indulge your customers in is relationship marketing. This is a process in which you treat each customer as special and ensure that you value the kind of business that they are getting for you. This is something that is relatively easy for a smaller base of customers where you interact with the customers on a one on one basis. For a large base of customers, remember that what binds a customer to the company includes recognition, impeccable service, proactive information and helpfulness, friendly employees and front office staff, brand equity and of course product quality and service.

This simple approach proposed here takes two steps: 1) Identifying the factors that affect attrition and 2) Identify which current customers are at risk of leaving.

Why do Customers Leave
Customers leave specific companies due to various reasons. Some of these factors are out of the immediate control of the company while some aspects a company can control for. There are some factors that companies can control directly and these are also the reasons for loss of customer. The U.S. Small Business Administration and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce lays down the percentages for the reasons why customers leave at the following percentages;
- Bad service or interactions with company professionals – 68%
- Unhappiness with the product performance or service – 14%
- Start doing business with competition – 9%
- Actively seek out alternatives to do business with other businesses – 5%
- Move or shift location – 3%
- Die – 1%

While these are some of the aspects that you should consider, the fact is that an exhaustive list of reasons for not using a brand or company is almost impossible to come up with. One should also keep in mind that there are some segments of customers that are always on the lookout for better products and offers in the market.

To ensure balance between the customer acquisition cost and the lifetime value of a customer, there are two options – wither the lifetime value of the customer has to be increased or the customer acquisition cost has to be decreased. While the process of reduction in cost is an ongoing one, efforts to ensure that the current customers are retained can ensure that the lifetime value of the customer increase.

Identifying Customers at Risk of Leaving
Market research platforms provide various techniques and methodologies that you can use to identify customers that are not happy. Some of these include logistic regression, decision trees, and neural networks. If you are lucky enough to have a captive set of customers and have a database of all, then finding and identifying unhappy and dissatisfied customers is relatively easy.

Once you have implemented your methodology to find the factors affecting attrition, you have created a “formula” that you can use to score your current clients. It is then straight forward to score each client and sort them by attrition score. These client at “high risk” can then be segmented in order to implement focused marketing strategies to each customer type. For example, price oriented customers at risk might receive a coupon while premium clients might receive a phone call from the customer rep. In either case, it is about taking different actions to each customer type that will increase the chances that the customer will stay with the company.

We have released a new version of Mineful. As any other web-based software, updates will be automatically reflected in your account the next time you log in. This latest release includes new analyses, more chart types, piping questions, lots of improvements, and bug fixes.

Enhancements:

• 3 Weighted Analyses: Question Score, Weighted Average, and the Mineful Customer Satisfaction Index.
• 2 Statistical Analyses: T-Test and TURF analysis.
• Radar chart to display results for various analysis including the new Question Score.
• Circling circle when going to the next page of a survey.
• Ability to assign question weights and choice weights.
• 3 new piped question on the Advanced Questions tab.
• Change number of columns for layout of mc-ma.
• Skip logic rules for mc-ma question improved.
• Scroll bar when editing a form field
• Support for space on column names uploaded

Fixes:

• Data not being stored when editing form data
• Running script on dashboards
• Remember survey choices after going back a page
• Spanish translations in various segments
• “+” sign showing on charts
• “%” sign crashing some of the analyses
• Global survey text size not affecting survey choices
• Refresh in form table view clears dropdowns
• Column names can have +255 characters
• Survey options not saving when changing tabs

The customer acquisition cost should be calculated by adding up all your costs for sales, marketing and dividing it by the number of new customers that you have received in the specific period. The total cost should include heads like salaries, headcount related allocations and more. If you want to assess the specific customer acquisition cost of various kinds of marketing activities, you will need to look at the amount of money that you have spent on the activity and the man-time that has been spent on managing the activity to arrive at the cost of the acquisition.

This is an exercise that will help you decide the specific marketing activities that you want to undertake for customer acquisition as well. Once you figure this number out, you will understand how important customer retention is for your business. It is also important that you look at the Lifetime Value of the Customer (LTC) to understand whether you are spending more money to get the customer than what you can expect back from them in terms of profit.