Surveying Surveys

The most important results of surveys may lie in the asking, not the answers, according to research by Paul M. Dholakia, assistant professor of management at Rice’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management.

With colleague Vicki G. Morwitz of New York University, Dholakia researched how surveys influence customer behavior. What they found, he says, is “astonishing.”

Dholakia and Morwitz wanted to test whether the process of measuring customers’ opinions with a survey causes significant changes in the customers’ subsequent behaviors. “More than 70 years ago, physicist Werner Heisenberg formulated the Uncertainty Principle, which recognizes that the very act of making a scientific observation fundamentally changes the object being observed,” Dholakia says. “In organizational psychology, there is a concept called the Hawthorne Effect, which says that obtrusively observing workers makes them more productive.”

The researchers conducted a field experiment involving customers of a large financial services firm in the United States. One group of customers participated in a telephone survey of customer satisfaction with the firm and its products, while an identical customer group, serving as the control, did not participate in any research. Both groups were then withheld from all of the firm’s targeted marketing, and their behaviors and profitability were tracked over a period of one year following the survey.

“The differences between the two groups were astonishing,” Dholakia says. “Our analyses showed that survey participants were more than three times as likely to open new accounts with the firm, less than half as likely to defect from it, and had a profitability profile that was significantly better than the nonparticipant control group. And these differences in behavior toward the firm persisted—survey participants continued to open new accounts at a faster rate and to defect at a slower rate than nonparticipants, even a year afterward.”

The fact that surveys engage customers is well known, so what’s new here? “There is considerable debate in marketing research circles regarding whether customers are engaged by or irritated by surveys and what causes one or the other reaction,” Dholakia says. “We go beyond this discussion to demonstrate that participation in a firm-sponsored survey not only influences how customers feel about the firm afterward but how they behave over a long period of time. Our research suggests that Heisenberg’s principle seems to apply to financial-service customers just as well as it does to electrons of carbon or hydrogen.

A number of alternative explanations can account for the researchers’ findings. One possibility is that survey participation may have made the customer’s evaluation of the firm more available when deciding how to behave on subsequent occasions. “This idea is consistent with the notion that participation in a survey induces a judgment that the person otherwise would not form,” Dholakia says. A second possibility is that being chosen to participate in a survey makes customers feel special and increases their attachment to the firm. A third possibility is that both these processes work together. “We are now conducting research,” Dholakia says, “to better understand which of these possibilities explains the differences that we found.”

Dholakia points out that it is possible that the customer’s level of satisfaction determines the subsequent customer relationship. “If this is the case,” he says, “then highly satisfied customers should become more loyal, purchase more, and become more profitable as a result of survey participation.” On the other hand, dissatisfied customers could become less loyal, purchase less, and become less profitable after the survey.

“An alternate possibility is that everyone, regardless of their level of satisfaction, becomes more loyal, purchases more, and becomes more profitable after the survey,” Dholakia says. “More research is needed to determine which of these happens. One thing is for sure: Participating in a survey will affect the customer relationship.”

—Karen English