Know Satisfaction: It All Starts With The iPSI

Industry leaders know that customer satisfaction data is an integral component of any business intelligence platform. If you've been following this blog over the last year, you've heard a lot of language surrounding the importance of knowing customer satisfaction by measuring it continuously. All of this is meaningless, of course, if you don't have good metrics to benchmark satisfaction and trend it over time.

But what defines a good metric? Is it popularity, ubiquity, truthworthiness? Yes, it's all of those things, and there are plenty of benchmark customer satisfaction metrics out there that fulfill each of those criteria. Yet so much of the data collection on which these measurements are based is done in an offline setting, divorced from the influence of Web 2.0 and the online consciousness. Further, the people whose voices are being heard in the bulk of traditional market research are in fact only participants in tightly controlled focus groups.

It is our firm belief that the iPerceptions Satisfaction Index (iPSI) is the only customer satisfaction metric designed exclusively to evaluate the experience of the online customer in the context of an actual site visit.

The iPSI had its genesis in the work of the late Dr. Max Garfinkle, who devised a cutting-edge perceptual framework for measuring organizational efficiency, which was later adapted and tailored to the web setting. The model analyzes the totality of the web experience at the convergence of two strategic axes. One axis pertains to time and gauges the creation of immediate versus long-term value; the other axis pertains to orientation and measures front-end user desirability versus back-end site usefulness.

Concatenating around the meeting point of these two lines are the Dimensions of the online experience. Four of these Dimensions--Navigation, Content, Interactivity, and Motivation--are formative, in the sense that they speak to the discernible strengths and weaknesses of the site. The fifth Dimension--Adoption—is summative, and it accounts for the overall online experience and the health of the brand.

Underpinning each Dimension is a customizable set of Attributes of the online experience, each measured on a 0 to 10 point scale. Each set of Attribute scores is rolled up into a Dimension Index, and all five Dimension Indexes are then rolled up to yield the composite iPSI score.

Unlike other customer satisfaction metrics, the iPSI begins with a devout respect for the voice of the customer. Other than undergoing basic integrity checks, the data that is compiled into an iPSI score is not cleaned up, doctored, or interfered with in any way. What’s more, unlike clickstream and usability metrics, the iPSI provides a genuine window into the feelings, concerns, and desires of respondents—that is, into the true soul of the web visitor. This is why so many progressive companies are turning to the iPSI as the gold standard for developing tactics that will help them optimize their websites, engender customer loyalty, and drive ROI.

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