Customer satisfaction is a measurement of the degree by which a product or service offered by a company either fails to meet, meets or goes beyond their customers' expectations.
Before
purchasing a product a person automatically builds a mental satisfaction
checklist of what they expect. How a company delivers against the
checklist defines the level of satisfaction of their customer.
A good example of a mental satisfaction checklist is a customer in a restaurant. On entry he or she will already have formed a list of expectations by which the service will be judged, e.g. speed of service, quality of food or politeness of staff, etc. The level of satisfaction felt by the customer depends upon how far the restaurant meets these expectations. In the next few pages we will look at how this can impact your business.
Loyalty is the degree to which a customer is likely to re-use your business. It's a valuable metric, as it enables you to understand how satisfaction is impacting future usage of your business. We will spend more time on this in Satisfaction Metrics