Hiring guide · 4 min read

Customer Satisfaction & NPS: 10 Questions to Ask Before You Hire a Research Firm

Ten questions to ask any customer satisfaction & nps provider in India before you sign, covering fieldwork, quality, sampling, data security and reporting.

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Quick answer

Before hiring a customer satisfaction & nps firm, ask who does the fieldwork, how quality is checked, how the sample is designed, which languages they cover, how data is secured, who writes the report, and what the deliverables include.

At a glance

Guide type: Hiring guide · 4 minute read
Method covered: Customer Satisfaction & NPS
Research family: Quantitative research
Typical timeline: 3–5 weeks for a benchmark study; continuous once the programme is live
Typical sample: 200+ responses per segment you will act on, with the response rate reported alongside
Written for: Buyers running a vendor call · Procurement scoring proposals · First-time commissioners

Key takeaways

Good firms answer these questions confidently
Ask for QC evidence from past projects
Check DPDP Act compliance
Meet the person who will lead your project

Reader intent

Who this guide is for

Three readers arrive here with different problems. Each should be able to act on this page without reading all of it.

Buyers running a vendor call
Questions that reveal whether an agency has actually run customer satisfaction & nps at your scale.
Procurement scoring proposals
A way to score the answers rather than the presentation.
First-time commissioners
What good answers sound like, so you can tell them from merely fluent ones.

The 10 questions

Do you run fieldwork in-house in my cities?
How do you verify interviews?
How will you design the sample?
Which languages do you work in?
How do you handle translation?
How is data secured, and are you DPDP compliant?
Who leads the project day to day?
Who writes the report?
What exactly will I receive? (e.g. nps dashboard, driver analysis, action plans)
Can I see a sample report?

How Market Research India can help

Market Research India designs and runs customer satisfaction & nps projects across 50 Indian cities and 30 industries. A senior research director leads every study, and our own supervised teams handle the fieldwork. You get clear recommendations, not just data tables.

Share your objective and we will send a scoped, fixed-fee proposal within 24 hours, with a recommended method, sample and timeline.

What goes wrong

Common mistakes in customer satisfaction & nps

Most disappointing customer satisfaction & nps studies fail for reasons that were visible in the design, not in the fieldwork. These are the ones we see most often, and what to do instead.

01
Surveying only the customers you can reach
Contactable, recent and happy customers answer first. If the sample is not drawn from the full base, the score flatters the business.
02
A score with no drivers
An NPS number on its own gives you the temperature, not the cause. Five to seven driver questions turn it into an action list.
03
Making the score a frontline incentive
The moment pay depends on it, staff coach customers at the point of asking and the measure stops describing reality.
04
No closed loop
Customers who raise an issue and hear nothing stop responding. Route detractors to a named owner within 48 hours.
05
Fieldwork without an audit trail
GPS tags, timestamps, audio snippets and back-checks are what let you defend a finding when a regional team disputes it. Specify them in the contract.
06
Significance claimed on thin bases
A gap between two sub-groups of forty respondents is rarely real. Agree the minimum reportable base before field and grey out everything below it in the tables.

Run through this before sign-off

Your checklist before you brief anyone

A working sequence for a customer satisfaction & nps project. Most of it costs nothing, and it saves the two weeks a re-field would take.

1
Draw the sample from the full customer base, not from the list that is easiest to reach.
2
Ask at a consistent point in the journey so the numbers stay comparable over time.
3
Add five to seven driver questions and one open verbatim to every survey.
4
Route detractors to a named owner within 48 hours and record the resolution.
5
Report drivers and response rate beside the score, every time.
6
Keep the raw data, the syntax and the tables together, so the analysis can be re-run.
7
Agree in writing who acts on each finding, and by when, before the debrief ends.

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Answers

Frequently asked questions

The questions buyers ask us most often before they commission customer satisfaction & nps.

Will you answer these questions for us?

Gladly. Ask us on a discovery call.

From guide to project

Where customer satisfaction & nps actually gets commissioned

If this guide has settled the method, these are the pages worth opening next: the service itself, and the markets where customer satisfaction & nps is most often run for our clients.

Keep exploring

Customer Satisfaction & NPS: 10 Questions to Ask Before You Hire a Research Firm

Who this guide is for

The 10 questions

How Market Research India can help

Common mistakes in customer satisfaction & nps

Your checklist before you brief anyone

Frequently asked questions

Where customer satisfaction & nps actually gets commissioned

More reading on customer satisfaction & nps

More on customer satisfaction & nps

Other hiring guide articles

Customer Satisfaction & NPS city by city

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