Measuring Customer Satisfaction in Arabic and English: Make the Scores Comparable
A bilingual satisfaction survey supports management only when Arabic and English responses measure the same experience. Translation is therefore one part of the design. The organisation must also define the customer event, adapt the questions, test how customers interpret them and establish whether the resulting scores can be compared.
Begin with the customer decision
Management may need to improve a service centre, compare branches or track a relationship. Each decision requires a different satisfaction measure. The research team must therefore name the experience, customer population, period and action before drafting a question.
A general satisfaction score cannot diagnose a specific failure. If management must improve an application process, the survey should measure that process and reach customers who attempted it. This boundary determines the questions, sample and time of contact.
Define the experience before translating it
Satisfaction may refer to one transaction, a service episode or the complete relationship. These are different judgements. Mixing them allows a customer's view of the brand to obscure a recent service failure, or one failure to dominate an otherwise stable relationship.
The questionnaire should state the experience and recall period in plain language. Each item should ask about one idea. The response scale must also match the judgement, whether it concerns satisfaction, effort, trust or another defined construct.
Develop the Arabic and English versions together
A literal translation can preserve words while changing the question. Arabic and English versions should therefore be developed through translation, independent review and reconciliation by people who understand both the language and the service context.
Back translation can reveal discrepancies, but it cannot prove that customers interpret a question in the same way. The review must examine the subject of the question, the intensity of each scale label and any expression that becomes formal, vague or culturally unusual in the other language.
Ask customers what each question means
Cognitive interviews test how intended respondents understand a question, recall the relevant experience and select an answer. The interviewer asks customers to explain their reasoning rather than merely confirm that the wording is clear.
These interviews may show that two grammatically correct versions prompt different judgements. The research team can then revise the wording and test it again. This step converts linguistic equivalence into evidence about customer interpretation.
Test the response process in a pilot
A pilot should reproduce the proposed invitation, channel, routing and survey timing. The team can then inspect completion, missing responses, scale use, response time and open comments by language and customer group.
However, a language difference may reflect the customers reached through each channel rather than the questionnaire. The pilot must retain invitation source, mode, eligibility, language choice and response status so that sampling and measurement effects can be separated.
Establish whether the scores can be compared
Reliability within each language does not establish comparability across languages. The analysis should examine whether items represent the same dimensions and whether respondents use the measurement scale in a sufficiently similar way.
Measurement-invariance tests provide one form of evidence. Item behaviour, cognitive-interview findings and sample composition provide others. If comparability remains weak, management should report the language results separately or limit the claim instead of presenting an unsupported ranking.
Interpret language differences carefully
Arabic and English respondents may differ in channel, nationality, tenure, product, location or service condition. A difference between language groups does not establish that language caused the difference.
The analysis should therefore compare like customer experiences where the data permit and state what remains different. Weighting can correct some known imbalances, but it cannot recover customers who were never invited or resolve an item that carries a different meaning.
Connect satisfaction with the service event
A score becomes more useful when the organisation can connect it, with appropriate safeguards, to the relevant wait, transaction outcome, channel or later customer behaviour. This evidence helps management distinguish dissatisfaction caused by the service from differences in response style.
The connection must preserve confidentiality and purpose. Small groups should not be reported when customers could be identified, and operational records should not be attached merely because they are available.
Apply the design to a service centre
Suppose a service centre asks Arabic and English customers how easy it was to complete a transaction. A literal translation may cause one group to rate the employee's helpfulness while the other rates the complete process. The two scores would appear comparable but answer different questions.
Marketways would define the transaction and recall period, develop both versions together and use cognitive interviews to test interpretation. A pilot would preserve branch, queue, channel and completion evidence. Only after the measure behaves comparably would management use the results to compare branches or redesign the process.
Build a bilingual measure management can defend
Marketways develops the source questions, Arabic and English versions, adaptation record, interview protocol, pilot and sampling design. We then examine item behaviour, measurement structure, language comparability and operational context.
The final output states which comparisons the evidence supports, which differences remain ambiguous and which service decisions can follow. Management receives a usable measure rather than two questionnaires that merely look alike.