What Is Derived Importance?
Often in market research surveys, we ask respondents to rate their satisfaction across different stages of the customer journey, such as satisfaction with pricing, quality, and customer service responsiveness. With this data, we can develop charts such as the one below that show satisfaction levels across attributes.
While this data can tell us how successfully a business is performing at each stage, it is often useful to calculate derived importance to see how important each stage actually is. By investigating how big an effect each stage has on overall satisfaction, we can determine where resource investment will most effectively improve the customer experience and where it will lead to minimal satisfaction gains. In this way, we can move from a simple rating of performance attributes to a model that remains grounded in data and recommends real-world future action.
For example, looking at the above graph in isolation (and abandoning common sense for a moment), we may erroneously conclude that all our time and resources should be focused on improving the quality of our free swag! However, when we look at the derived importance chart below, we can see that although satisfaction with promotional products is low, it contributes very little to overall satisfaction and therefore falls into the ‘focus if resources permit’ quadrant. We can also see that product quality is an important contributor to overall satisfaction, but performance is weaker here, making it a priority area for improvement.
Looking at attribute satisfaction in this way allows us to determine where the real opportunities to improve customer satisfaction lie without wasting resources in areas of little importance.
How Is It Calculated?
To calculate derived importance, the survey needs to contain a measure of overall satisfaction and questions that survey satisfaction across various customer journey stages. With around 100 or more respondents, correlation analysis can be conducted to determine the relative importance of each journey stage.
Why It Matters: Derived vs. Stated Importance
Research has found that when customers are directly asked about how important certain factors are to them, there is a tendency to focus on more obvious, rational factors such as price and quality and to understate more emotion-driven factors. By avoiding direct questioning, hidden drivers of satisfaction can be identified and used to reliably inform real-world strategy.
Overall, derived importance is an incredibly effective tool in the researcher’s arsenal because it transforms simple attribute ratings into real-world actionable strategy, uncovering hidden drivers of satisfaction that direct questioning might miss.
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