Don’t keep the customer satisfied:

Simon and Garfunkel were wrong about ‘keeping the customer satisfied’.  Customer satisfaction can kill your organization.

This happens when you spend more on keeping customers satisfied than they spend with you.  And when you go out of business, you have actually provided the worst possible service to your loyal customers.

The problem is that there is no simple way to measure customer satisfaction.  People have different needs which translate into different levels of satisfaction.  The catch?  Some of your customers will never be satisfied.  On the other hand, it is easy to measure loyalty – how often does this customer spend money with us?

Customer loyalty tends to cost less.  An obvious reason is that it is cheaper to keep existing customers than to compete for new ones.  Less obvious is that loyal customers are more forgiving when you make mistakes.

And that can be priceless.

I’m James McIntosh at nonsenseatwork.com

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© 2010 James Henry McIntosh