Client Satisfaction: What Clients Actually Rate – Dr. Florian Bresler

Three perspectives on success

Marketing research usually judges success from two directions: from the customer's side and from the value of the company. For agency work this falls short, because many messages do not aim at a sale at all. Image and public relations work mainly affect reputation. The dissertation therefore adds a third perspective, that of society, and draws on 24 empirical studies on communication success.

• Customer value: attitude, loyalty and trust of the client's customers.
• Social value: public interest and gain in reputation and image.
• Financial value: market value, return on equity and Tobin's q.

How satisfaction arises

Satisfaction arises from comparing expected and received performance. If it lasts, loyalty grows from it, and over a longer time both form trust. Trust rests on the assumed credibility, reliability and honesty of a partner. Because these variables cannot be observed directly, they are normally collected through surveys.

For the influence of communication on customer value, the dissertation evaluates, among other things, a survey of 383 consumers in which brand awareness, attitude, preference and purchase intention were positively related. According to the literature, the three success measures are also related to each other: customer and social value are supposed to be reflected in company value over time. The survey did not estimate this chain; in the model, communication quality acts on each of the three measures individually.

What clients report

Every statement in the survey referred to a specific, completed project and was rated from 1 (no agreement) to 5 (maximum agreement). Clients see customer value improved most: the means for attitude, loyalty and trust lie between 3.69 and 3.80, and 64 percent agree highly or fully that their customers' attitude has improved. For social value the means are 3.43 and 3.55. Financial value fares weakest: its means are around 3.15, and 28 to 31 percent of respondents see no or only minor effects.

The study itself points out that satisfaction surveys tend toward friendly judgments. The absolute values should therefore be read with caution; the ranking is more telling.

What remains in the model

High means do not yet show what explains quality. Customer loyalty received the highest mean of all 20 statements and still dropped out of the model. In the final model, customer trust is most closely tied to communication quality (standardized weight 0.80), with reputation gain following at 0.14. Attitude and loyalty, rated highest in the preliminary study, dropped out.

For financial value, the survey found no significant effect (p = 0.24). The study names several reasons: financial success depends on competition, the economy and innovative strength, the effects of communication arrive with a delay, and the values were collected as assessments rather than calculated from balance sheet or price data. Anyone who measures a communication project only by returns or market value measures where respondents saw the least effect.

Surveying satisfaction with little effort

The dissertation provides no ready-made procedure for everyday agency work, but a pattern that can be scaled down. The following steps are a transfer of this pattern, not a finding of the study:

• Ask after the project ends, and about exactly this project, not about the agency in general.
• A few statements suffice: trust of the client's own customers, the company's reputation, improved attitude of the target group. Each statement on the same scale from 1 to 5.
• Evaluate trust first and do not make the return of a single project the yardstick.
• Discuss the results in a team session so that they flow back into the next projects as learning.

This keeps the survey short, and the effort for client and agency stays in reasonable proportion to the insight gained.