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Keep The Customer Satisfied? Not enough.

Let me amplify one of the points made in our lead story in Inside 1to1 this week. Customer satisfaction is not only a lame measurement of customer strategy, it is simply not enough to achieve. I am a satisfied ExxonMobil customer. And as soon as a competitor comes up with one of those cool little Speedpass keys that keeps me tied to ExxonMobil it will take a hot minute to switch. Why? Because at eight billion dollars of profit for the second quarter running you can “scuse my dust when I step on the gas” as the old song says. I am a satisfied T-Mobile customer. But when my contract is up, I’m shopping. I am a satisfied Nike customer, but I think those Asics running shoes the sales clerk recommended last month feel pretty good. Customer satisfaction is simply not enough to produce loyalty. It is a temporary measurement that gets blown away easily because customers like change. They like to be treated fairly. And they want as much transparency as they can get into what they pay for (like eight billion profits at $3.15 a clip). I would argue that customer satisfaction needs some kind of “futures index.” Some kind of measurement that predicts whether current satisfaction will lead to future satisfaction and ultimately more deeply rooted loyalty.