Customer Satisfaction is Overrated

Customer satisfaction rates are overrated – I believe the most important Customer service metric a company can have is not their Customer satisfaction rates, but rather their Customer retention rates. Are you getting them to return and do business with you again? That is it, stop right there. They can give you a high mark on Customer satisfaction or are likely to refer, but that doesn’t mean they are coming back. If they don’t come back, what good is a 9 out of 10 Customer satisfaction score? Focus on the percent of that return and refer other Customers. That is the key.

Money can’t buy you love, health & retained Customers – It can buy all sorts of new Customers through aggressive advertising. But what an advertising budget can’t buy you is retained Customers. Companies will throw millions of dollars at marketing, advertising, and branding campaigns that promote a message that is contradictory to what the Customer actually experiences.

New Customer acquisition is overrated – A steady stream of new Customers can almost be a negative thing. If your staff knows that no matter how good they are, there is a constant supply of new Customers, then why do they need to be great? When a company focuses on Customer retention, it forces them to focus on the right things, the entire Customer experience that delights the Customer at every interaction. By investing 50 percent of your marketing budget into dramatically improving the level of your organization’s Customer service, you will see a significantly greater return on investment (ROI) than you were getting with your marketing and advertising dollars. Your Customer base will turn into an unpaid sales force. Your company, leaders and employees need to be losing sleep at night over their retention rates.

*Related Get your masters in Customer Experience

Do you know what your Customers prefer? Today Customers want fast service, flexibility and ease. In order to do that, you better know what that means to them. For instance, do you know how different generations perceive and prefer to interact with your company’s Customer service? It is not at all like it was even five years ago. Take, for instance, the results from a survey conducted by Desk.com:

• 41% of baby boomers prefer calling Customer service
• 24% of millennials prefer online chat over calling
• Millennials are actually more patience than baby boomers when holding on the phone
• Millennials have less patience when it comes to poor service; 27% will stop using a brand after one bad experience

Less than 20 tickets left to the 2015 Secret Service Summit – America’s #1 Customer service conference was featured on WKYC News last week. The 2015 Secret Service Summit is less than two weeks away and twenty tickets (two tables) remain. We have already sold over 500 tickets. Find out how you can be the brand Customers cannot live without. Last chance to register.