Should we measure customer satisfaction?

You probably believe that customer satisfaction is very important.

However it is becoming increasingly clear that it is not. The problem is that what customers say and how they act with customer satisfaction surveys (although important) being a poor predicator of buying behavior or customer loyalty.

So, the pursuit of customer satisfaction as the end goal of sales and marketing is misguided. Satisfaction is a fluffy and wooly concept that misses the whole point of the buyer-seller relationship. It is not the satisfaction of the buyer that matters, but the results you have helped them achieve.

Asking your clients if they are satisfied is simply the wrong question. Sellers must measure themselves on the metrics used by their customers.

So instead of saying 67% of our customers are satisfied or very satisfied, sellers should be able to say something like:
• 75% of our customers saved more than they expected using our solutions, with the average saving equating to 5% of total project costs.
• 1.25% was the improvement of margins resulting from the implementation of our solutions.
• Our customers have improved stock accuracy levels by 20% since the implementation of our solutions, with the net bottom line impact of 2%.

Posted by Ray Collis on Nov 16 2010. Filed under 2. Forget Customer Satisfaction, Account Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry