Current Customers as CSAT Measure

When companies worry about customer satisfaction, many concern themselves with the satisfaction of their current customers. Your current customers are your base, and you want to make sure that they are satisfied in order for your company to thrive. Yet some experts suggest that this may not be the best method of evaluating customer satisfaction – their belief is that your current customers are not the sample that really matters, because they are not providing you with the data you’re currently looking for.

The reason that using your current customer base as a sample may not be ideal is because it may not be measuring what you want it to measure. The key idea is that your current customers are, by and large, “satisfied enough.” The vast majority of your customers are unlikely to defect any time soon – otherwise your company would probably already be in big trouble – which means that in general they are going to be fairly satisfied. At least enough to generate business. In addition, those that leave your company are going to be the least satisfied, but they won’t show up in the data, because they are not part of your current customer base.

Customer satisfaction is also studied to spot customers before they decide to defect to one of your competitors. But even then, the data may be hard to collect. If 90% of your customers are satisfied, but 10% are dissatisfied to the point they are preparing to leave, the data is going to be heavily weighted by the 90% that are staying. You lose a lot of that interesting information.

Conducting research that includes lost customers, potential customers, perception of the company by non-customers or non-regular customers, etc., is difficult and time consuming, but it is not impossible. There are ways that you can include lost customers in your sample, and things you can do to find other data from the rest of the market. If you do not have the resources to conduct that type of research, then studying only your current customer base can still provide interesting knowledge.

Just make sure you understand the limitations. You do not want to misunderstand the data that you do receive, since the information is going to be bias in favor of your business even if there is a chance people are leaving your company.