Beyond Customer Satisfaction

Beyond Customer Satisfaction

A White Paper by Daniel Park, Associate Consultant, and Paul Hague of B2B International

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INTRODUCTION

Recently, when preparing for a presentation, Dan was re-reading some material that suddenly struck him in a different way compared with his previous reading of it. Drawing on original USA research from customer satisfaction surveys the American marketing specialist Jack Trout makes the following points:

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More than 40 per cent of customers who claimed to be satisfied switched suppliers without looking back. (So many choices, so little time.) Eighty nine per cent of people who owned cars from a certain manufacturer said they were very satisfied and 67 per cent said that they intended to purchase another car from that manufacturer. Fewer than 20 per cent actually did so. Source: Trout (2000) p 33. Clearly the above raises interesting questions about the subject of customer satisfaction and it has prompted a very lively exchange of thoughts between the two authors named above. Out of this came the decision to write this short B2B White Paper jointly. Common sense tells us that if businesses fail to satisfy customers they are unlikely to stay in business very long, unless either (a) they are in a monopoly position with no costcomparable substitutes or (b) they are the final choice supplier in a sector where every other supplier is experiencing fully utilised capacity that is contractually committed and therefore cannot be released at higher, market-clearing prices. Few organisations nowadays find themselves in this luxurious position. Consequently, as Trout illustrates, the achievement of measured customer satisfaction may not always translate directly into customer retention and profit over time.

IS EVERYBODY HAPPY?

As a backcloth to this discussion, it is helpful to consider exactly what satisfaction means. If...