Customer satisfaction is not important…

Most executives believe that high customer satisfaction scores correlate with sustainable growth. Conversely, significant drops in scores should link to declines in growth.

But this isn't necessarily so.

In fact, executives who are obsessed with satisfaction are focusing on the wrong metric.

Confused? Read on.

Okay. We all think that if we strive for customer satisfaction levels of 90% or 95% that our sales will increase. That is not really the way it works.

When I first graduated from high school, I worked for AT&T. I worked in the leased telephone division. One of my jobs was to convince people that leasing a telephone made sense. I was supposed to help them keep contracts on telephonee equipment whether they needed them or not (sound like AOL?).

One of the marketing initiatives was advertising that 94% of our customers said that we had "excellent" customer service. The managers hoped that if the word excellent was spoken to our customers during the call that when the surveyors called they would be more likely to say we had "excellent" customer service.

As a result, I was required to say, "I hope that I provided you 'excellent' customer service today." Basically, we baited the customer. And we had to do this even if we knew that our customer service was terrible.

So, what is the difference between excellent, super, great or outstanding? Or, what is the difference between excellent, good, or pretty darn acceptable? It all depends on the way the consumer thinks. But we were able to acheive an "excellent" rating of 96%... before they closed the division for failure to meet revenue and profit targets.

Our improvment in our rating didn't make a bit of difference on our revenues. Bottom line, customer satisfaction levels don't make a bit of difference unless you can connect emotionally with your customer. Do you think that New Media can help you connect emotionally with your customers and provide a better customer experience?