Popular metrics such as customer satisfaction, acquisition, and retention have turned out to be very poor indicators of customers’ true perceptions or the success of marketing activities. Often, they’re downright misleading. High overall customer satisfaction scores, for example, often mask narrow but important pain points-areas of major dissatisfaction-such as unhappiness with poor customer service or long wait times. They can also mask backsliding against competitors; while gently climbing satisfaction scores may be reassuring to management and the board, if competitors’ scores are increasing faster it should be a cause for alarm. Acquisition rates may be robust, but if old customers are abandoning ship as fast as new ones are coming on board, strong acquisition can give a deceptive picture of marketing performance. And what, exactly, should the board make of stable customer retention? If customers are staying on because they’re held hostage by a contract, good retention may be obscuring the truth that customers will flee the instant they can.
Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge
Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales
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