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Is customer satisfaction worth the cost? To find out, the authors investigated the relationship between customer satisfaction and business outcomes, gathering data from more than 100,000 consumers covering more than 300 brands. Although high customer satisfaction ratings are typically treated by managers as being universally good for business, the authors'findings indicate that the benefits are not nearly so clear-cut. There is a downside to continuously devoting resources to raise customer satisfaction levels. Managers are rarely able to accurately quantify the cost associated with increasing customer satisfaction scores (for example, from 8.7 to 9.1 on a 10-point scale), nor are they able to determine precisely what such an increase is actually worth. It turns out the return on these investments is often trivial or even negative. Knowing a customer's satisfaction level tells you little about how he or she will divide his or her spending among the different brands used. As a result, changes in customer satisfaction levels are unlikely to have a meaningful impact on the share of category spending customers allocate with your brand. Why? Single-brand loyalty, which was common in our parents'and grandparents'generations, has been replaced with loyalty to multiple brands in a category in many sectors. Because of this divided loyalty, more customers partially defect (in other words, they give more of their business to a competitor) than completely defect from a business or brand. As a result, improving customers'share of spending with your brand tends to represent a far greater opportunity than efforts to improve customer retention. kThe measure that really matters, according to the authors, isn't your percentage of delighted customers or promoters. What matters is the relative "rank"that your brand's satisfaction level represents vis-àvis your competitors.

Traditional metrics like satisfaction and Net Promoter scores correlate poorly with what matters most: share of wallet. Managers need to think about how they rank versus their competitors and apply a new formula, the Wallet Allocation Rule, to predict and improve their share of wallet.

In recent years, researchers and consultants have advanced a number of customer metrics to explain the connections between customer behavior and growth. But these efforts have generated more smoke than heat. Despite claims to the contrary, the authors argue that the most popular metrics have shown only modest correlations to growth. None of them appear to be universally effective across all competitive environments. Early customer metrics tried to explain why people buy. To many companies, it came down to marketing. Yet, as the authors explain, the issues that affect customer loyalty are complex and go beyond standard marketing. This gave rise to a new category of metrics aimed at understanding customer experience. Although managers have learned a lot about the components of service quality (including reliability, responsiveness and empathy), the approach doesn't point managers to specific actions t. Beginning in the 1990s, many managers began paying closer attention to customer retention -- in particular, understanding dissatisfaction and satisfaction. But as the authors note, the linkages among satisfaction, customer behavior and positive financial outcomes have been modest. Today's most popular metric, the Net Promoter Score, focuses on how customer word of mouth -- both negative and positive -- can advance growth. Developed by Bain & Company Inc. consultant Fred Reichheld, it claims the ability to predict future growth from customer replies to one question: "How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?" The authors found that the linkage between the NPS and subsequent customer behavior was modest at best; models based on multiple variables consistently outperformed models based on NPS. The authors are skeptical that there can be a single metric that reduces complex, multifaceted constructs to one or two dimensions; if there is, they write, "there's a good chance it will ignore one or more important aspects of the equation."

Blind reliance on customer loyalty as a universal goal will put you out of business, warn the authors. Any loyalty initiative needs to begin with an understanding of the profitability of individual customers. Their investigation revealed more than 50 commonly-held beliefs about customer loyalty that turned out to be oversimplifications, exaggerations or just plain lies. The difficult truth is that the links between customer loyalty and business profitability are far more complex than we have been led to believe. The authors provide the top ten key misunderstandings surrounding this widely-coveted phenomenon and provide advice for firms to counter each.