Designing measurement tools to improve fluency and certainty: The case of online customer satisfaction evaluation

Online shopping development went hand in hand with online self-administered customer satisfaction evaluation requirement. However, the specific context of online rating, without any face-to-face clarification, raises the question of accuracy and appropriateness of the chosen tool for respondents. To address this issue, this research proposes the new concept of "response fluency" to qualify the ease with which a question is processed. Applied to the Evaluative Space Grid,a new grid that has been proposed in psychology to measure overall evaluation, this research shows how response fluency mediates the influence of measurement tool design on response certainty. More specifically, it tests the effects of two alternative tool design formats (i.e., a reduction of the grid's response cell number and the display of labels to the response cells) in terms of response fluency and certainty. Using a between-subjects experiment, we show that the display of labels in the cells actually increases response fluency and, in turn, response certainty. By contrast, reducing the response cell number does not produce any effect. We contend that well-designed measurement tools can make the process of responding more fluent and increase respondents' subjective confidence in their capability of conveying their true evaluations. In the end, this work advocates for new research to design measurement tools likely to engage respondents when answering surveys and prevent dropout rates, which is especially challenging within self-administered electronic settings.