March 29, 2024

What Is Important to Your Hearing Aid Clients… and Are They Satisfied? – The Hearing Review

Market Research | June 2022 Hearing Review

Better listening in noise looms large for satisfying hearing aid users–especially older clients.

By Jennifer Appleton-Huber, MChem, MSc

What are the major drivers of customer satisfaction with hearing aids? Almost all surveys emphasize the importance of hearing speech in noise. Recent consumer surveys also indicate that …….

Market Research | June 2022 Hearing Review

Better listening in noise looms large for satisfying hearing aid users–especially older clients.

By Jennifer Appleton-Huber, MChem, MSc

What are the major drivers of customer satisfaction with hearing aids? Almost all surveys emphasize the importance of hearing speech in noise. Recent consumer surveys also indicate that the main drivers of hearing aid satisfaction are sound quality or hearing aid performance over their satisfaction with the hearing care professional (HCP) or hearing aid physical qualities. Listening situations most important to hearing aid users for speech understanding are: 1:1 conversations and group conversations in noise, soft speech in quiet, understanding speech without visual cues, and speech at a distance.

Hearing aid manufacturers and hearing care professionals devote a huge amount of their resources on products and services that designed to provide optimal outcomes and satisfaction to the clients of hearing care professionals (HCPs). But what do these clients really value relative to hearing aid features and benefits, and how well are we actually satisfying their most important hearing needs? This article looks at some recent well-documented consumer surveys on customer satisfaction with hearing aids, and adds some important points drawn from new research conducted by Sonova. 

What Do MarkeTrak & EuroTrak Say?

MarkeTrak 2019 findings. The MarkeTrak 10 survey was conducted in 2019, surveying 20,072 households in the United States on health matters, and from this, recruited 3,132 individuals with hearing difficulty to gain further insights into hearing healthcare and hearing aids (for an overview, see Powers & Rogin1 and Picou2). A total of 969 hearing aid owners were surveyed.  When questioned about hearing aid satisfaction drivers, hearing aid performance in quiet and in noise and sound quality were found to have the biggest impact on hearing aid satisfaction. The top contributors to this hearing aid performance for sound quality were the ability to tell direction, natural sounding, rich sound, minimizes background sound, and clear tone. 

The next most important factor was the effectiveness of the HCP. Other factors which played a role in hearing aid satisfaction were hearing aid physical qualities, such as appearance and size, hearing aid maintenance including cleaning care and battery changing, and lastly, financial costs. 

Hearing aid owners were then asked how satisfied they were with their hearing aid(s) in each listening situation from a given list. Participants with hearing loss or hearing difficulty who did not own hearing aids (n=2,163) were asked to indicate how satisfied they were with their ability to hear in each given listening situation. Owners of hearing aids were found to be more satisfied with their hearing ability than non-owners of hearing aids across all listening situations. When looking specifically at which situations …….

Source: https://hearingreview.com/hearing-loss/patient-care/counseling-education/what-important-to-your-hearing-aid-clients-are-they-satisfied