Customer satisfaction is vital to every company out there relying on service for their business. But how do you get the right kind of feedback? A recent study by Maritz Research suggests a new way to go about it.

From the study:

Manufacturers and service providers commonly measure the satisfaction of their customers—not unreasonably, they believe that increases in customer loyalty, positive word-of-mouth and revenues from repeat business will result from improved customer satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction surveys enable companies to pick their customers’ brains, giving a glimpse of how the company is doing overall.

Managers also use customer satisfaction surveys prescriptively, to identify for improvement the elements of their products and related services that drive customer satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction surveys can convey the customer experience, if they’re in-depth enough. What’s required is a little more probing (without annoying the customers, of course).

To add depth, Maritz researchers Keith Chrzan and Michael Kemery have come up with the Make or Break model for customer satisfaction. In a nutshell, instead of simply asking the customer how things went, the Make or Break model goes on to ask why.

In their research paper, the authors use the example of a survey aimed at modeling “the effects of ten performance attributes on an overall satisfaction (loyalty, etc.) measure.”

In a traditional survey, the researchers would ask customers to express satisfaction or dissatisfaction (on a scale, of course) with each of the 10 attributes. The researchers would then rate the performance of each of the attributes.

The Make or Break model goes one step farther. For satisfied customers (completely or somewhat), researchers ask an additional question about which of the 10 attributes, if any, might have swayed the whole customer experience. For dissatisfied customers, they asked what negative aspect may have ruined things.

Whereas a standard regression analysis would include ten parameters (one for each of the performance ratings), the Make or Break model contains up to 30 parameters.