Loyalty versus Satisfaction - What's the Difference?

Satisfaction will not tell you if your customers will defect or your association members will drop their memberships.

Loyalty measurement captures the voice of the customer; their expectations and your performance against those expectations, as well as what you need to do to improve. Unlike satisfaction, loyalty encompasses the total customer experience; giving you a foundation for better decision making and action planning.

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Loyalty Research: The Next Generation of Voice-of-the-Member Research

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Research Process Overview

When establishing a baseline customer loyalty measurement program, The Loyalty Research Center takes a new client through a sequential, five-stage process. Each stage is important for successful program design and execution and is carefully planned out jointly with our clients.

The process takes clients from the investigative or exploratory phase and ends with a plan for continuous measurement and tracking. It begins by assuring that the design of the program accurately reflects the organization—its structure, process, goals and customer interactions. It ends with a go-forward plan for monitoring change initiatives and supporting continuous improvement and performance tracking. The graphic below provides an outline of activities that usually occur at each stage.

Research Tailored to Your Unique Needs & Challenges

Our model is not an off-the-shelf solution. We view it as a framework from which to build a tailored measurement program that addresses the unique needs and challenges of each client’s business.

The Loyalty Research Center launches each study with an investigative phase which allows for better understanding of the company, its ways of operating, and the customer relationship. Trained and licensed in qualitative research, the Loyalty Research Center leverages a variety of techniques for obtaining important information internally and externally. This can consist of one-on-one interviews with senior management, group discussions with functional area heads, and focus groups with defined employee work groups.

Against this backdrop of internally generated information, we conduct one-on-one telephone discussions and even on-site visits to customers. Understanding the customer point of view is critical; it is not unusual to find differing descriptions of needs when speaking with the customer.

While another loyalty/satisfaction research company may tell you that their defined model is the standard by which all others should be judged, ask for evidence showing how their programs have impacted organizations and financial results. Standard just isn’t good enough for companies desiring to drive results.

The Loyalty Research Center Difference