Completely Satisfied Customers Spend 2.6x Somewhat Satisfied Customers
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Thu, Mar 04, 2010
I get a lot of pushback when I advocate using "Completely Satisfied" as part of my recommended customer satisfaction ratings scale. Complaints include:
- "No one is ever completely satisfied."
- "If we replace our high end of ‘Very Satisfied' with ‘Completely Satisfied', we are going to lower all our scores."
Tough, I say. Jones and Sasser reported in their Harvard Business Review article "Why Satisfied Customers Defect" that completely satisfied customers were six times more likely to repurchase over the next year and a half than somewhat satisfied customers. While those numbers are atypical, Esteban Kolsky recently pointed me to some InfoQuest research that provides further evidence of the high value of completely satisfied customers.
InfoQuest has used the following customer satisfaction scale in tens of thousands of major-account business-to-business surveys:
- Totally Satisfied
- Somewhat Satisfied
- Insufficient Information to Evaluate
- Somewhat Dissatisfied
- Totally Dissatisfied
Why "Totally Satisfied"? As they write:
‘Totally Satisfied' denotes a complete absence of issues. Customers who respond in such a way are indicating they have no unmet needs or desires; that there is nothing the client can do to improve their performance. That alone is the one true foundation of meaningful customer satisfaction and loyalty.
InfoQuest built a statistical model to estimate the correlation between customer satisfaction and revenue, tracking 20,000 customer responses over three years, comparing satisfaction levels in year 1 to account histories in year 3. Results differed dramatically based on satisfaction level.
A totally-satisfied customer contributed 2.6 times the annual revenue that a somewhat-satisfied customer generated and 14 times the revenue of a somewhat dissatisfied customer.
To me, this is further proof that your organization should aim for total satisfaction, in both the service you offer and the satisfaction you measure.
