Customer Satisfaction May Be the Wrong Target
Customer satisfaction has been treated like the golden calf of business for years. Companies send surveys, collect ratings, measure smiley faces, and proudly announce that 87% of their customers are “satisfied.” Wonderful. That and five dollars might get you a coffee, assuming your satisfied customer does not buy it from someone else. Because here is the uncomfortable truth: satisfied customers still disappear. They do not always complain. They do not always leave angry. They just drift away quietly, like relatives after dinner when someone mentions helping with the dishes. Satisfaction is nice, but it is not the finish line. The real goals are customer acquisition, customer experience, and customer expansion. In plain English: get the right people’s attention, give them a reason to buy, deliver an experience worth remembering, and create enough value that they come back, buy more, and tell other humans. Most businesses spend a lot of time
