Customer Experience Drives Satisfaction and Loyalty
By Jeffery Henning / Founder and VP of Strategy
How does measuring customer experience fit with traditional models that measure customer satisfaction and loyalty? Experience is an interaction between a brand and its customers, an interaction that leads to an attitude (satisfaction), which itself leads to behavior (loyalty or disloyalty).
Key aspects of the customer experience are how useful a product or service is, how easy it is to use, and how enjoyable the interaction is. Satisfaction, in turn, is composed of overall satisfaction and mental comparisons of the interaction to initial expectations and to the ideal interaction. Together customer experience and satisfaction cause a change in the behavior of the customer, encouraging or discouraging them from purchasing again, purchasing more and recommending the brand to others.
Organizations have often wondered why customer satisfaction alone does not always predict loyalty behaviors – and the customer experience itself is one of the reasons. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the interaction with the product, service and firm itself affect loyalty. Forrester is able to demonstrate this with a mathematical model: the Forrester CxPi measure of customer experience shows a strong correlation to loyalty behaviors across 13 industries (see the independent report, “The Business Impact of Customer Experience, 2010”, for more detail).
Firms that don’t measure and study the customer experience are often uncertain of why they have low ratings on satisfaction and loyalty, and they are unclear about what changes they need to make to improve attitudes and behavior. Studying the quality of the customer experience helps reveal where an organization is falling short and where it can improve.
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