Many people believe that satisfaction is the ultimate customer experience metric. It is not. In fact, it’s typically not an appropriate customer experience metric at all.

Think about it.

What is satisfaction? 
It’s a rating of how much the value a customer thinks they got, compared to the value they expected to get. In other words, satisfaction is a measure of perceived value. 

What affects that perception of value? 
Pretty much anything: brand image, pricing, the range of available alternatives, features, quality, adoption barriers, ease of use, reliability, customer care, yelp reviews, advertising and awareness, the sales experience, et. cetera. Change any one of them and satisfaction will likely change.

Next question: If you work in customer experience, which of those factors above do you control or can you directly impact? A minority of them at best. You likely don’t control brand, marketing, pricing, ad copy, product design, what your competitors do, etc. 

Next next question: Does it make sense to have your performance judged on a metric that is almost completely out of your control, where cause and effect cannot be easily demonstrated, and where there are manifold, often unknowable factors that might move scores up or down? I don't think so.

There you have it. Satisfaction is typically not an appropriate metric for judging the success of CX initiatives. Worst of all? It makes demonstrating value to business stakeholders all but impossible — something that should be on everyone’s list for 2023 as the belts tighten…

The leader’s guide to customer experience e-learning course — which explains all this sort of stuff and what to do about it — is coming next Monday.

See this post on LinkedIn