Fundamental CSAT Data Issue

Customer satisfaction has long been an important measurement for understanding your business. It is designed to help companies discover when there is something wrong with how customers view their products and services, and ensure that you are not losing customers because they are not receiving the satisfaction drivers they need. But customer satisfaction isn’t – and should never be – the only thing you measure. That is because there is one fundamental flaw with the customer satisfaction logic – while satisfaction shows you how well your products and service have been able to contribute to satisfaction, it doesn’t show you what will create satisfaction in the future.

Satisfaction is constantly changing. Not long ago, people were satisfied with very basic cell phones that could only make calls and text message. Then, as new smartphones were invented, those same customers find that “old technology” to be relatively useless, and it will no longer receive the high satisfaction scores it once received despite nothing else changing.

This is why customer satisfaction alone is not to be interpreted as a sign of the future. Rather, it is designed to be a measurement to find out if the tools you already have in place are continuing to be as effective as you believed them to be, and as a way to warn you if there are any problems in the future that are likely to arise. Satisfaction is, itself, a measurement of the past, and while you can learn valuable things about the future, you always need to remember that satisfaction alone may not tell you the exact right course of action for the ever changing customer personality.

In order to understand how to increase satisfaction and purchasing power, you will have to combine your satisfaction research with other research about future behaviors, and take what you learn from your customer satisfaction survey about what learns and what doesn’t and try to make sure that you’re continuing to advance your satisfaction efforts, even if your overall scores are fairly high.

Customer satisfaction is very valuable, but that value derives from understanding your results correctly. If you give them more meaning than they’re intended to show, and don’t combine them with other types of survey research that help you discover what to do to increase buying behavior, attract customers, maintain customers, etc., then you are not going to be able to get the benefits from your satisfaction efforts.