Support Services

October, 2007
Opportunities for Increasing your Customer Satisfaction

In 2005 Sergei Kochkin surveyed 3,000 hearing instrument wearers to determine their levels of satisfaction with their hearing instruments. Here is our summary of his findings.

Customer satisfaction is key to obtaining referrals from your existing client base. 73% of satisfied customers are prepared to recommend their hearing aid dispenser to family and friends.

The top 5 specific factors that most correlate to overall hearing instrument satisfaction in Kochkin’s sample are:

1. Clarity of sound
2. Value (performance relative to price)
3. Reliability
4. Natural sounding
5. Ability to hear in small groups

Reliability is important to customer satisfaction as is price, but only in relationship with the overall benefit provided by the hearing instrument. If these two elements are put aside, it appears that customer satisfaction is driven primarily by factors relating to Sound Quality and Signal Processing.

The implication is that incremental improvements in these areas will drive improvements in overall satisfaction.

Kochkin breaks Sound Quality and Signal Processing down into its component parts and using a weighting mechanism each element can be awarded a Satisfaction Score.

Satisfaction Score


Please click the above graph to view a larger version (opens new browser window.)

The Satisfaction Score illustrates clearly the overall satisfaction of a typical hearing instrument wearer with each component part of Sound Quality and Signal Processing. It shows that they are very satisfied with the level of localization they are already experiencing from their current hearing instruments. By contrast, they experience the least satisfaction when using hearing instruments in noisy environments.

This table enables us to identify easily the areas where the greatest opportunities lie for increasing our customers’ satisfaction levels. By focusing on the areas with the lowest satisfaction scores and prioritizing these needs when recommending suitable hearing instruments we can increase satisfaction levels and as a result increase the number of new patient referrals.

To read Kochkin’s article in full, please click below.




Customer Satisfaction 2005 by Sergei Kochkin
(PDF 4.26MB)



Don’t forget that most CPD schemes will allocate points for reading relevant journals or white papers. Be sure to include the time you spend reading white papers on your personal CPD log forms.