Yeah, it was, so don’t bother seeking to improve customer satisfaction. To be honest, the idea that we can get people to be satisfied is in some way an indicator of success, is gone. It left us when we decided to compete on price more than anything else.
I never compete on price, because someone else always has a lower price than you do. Sooner or later, someone in China is going to make a knock off of what you make. Sure it will probably kill the end user but it looks just like yours and costs a lot less. Over the last 20 years, businesses have trained consumers to look for the best price, not the best quality in product or service. This type of mental training has lead to customer satisfaction becoming basically useless as a measurement.
Case in point, I know a lot of people who are happy or satisfied with a particular product. However, they will jump ship if something else comes along at a lower prices that is perceived to be equal or better and in some cases even an inferior product but close enough. Satisfaction won’t tell you if these customers will stay or go. We need to focus on customer loyalty, what is the loyalty rating of customers? Most of you have no clue how to even measure that. It is doable and generally a lot simpler than most think.
Loyalty helps you to better understand who really is a true customer, someone who is going to stick around and also, how to get the fence sitters to become loyal or if you are really wasting money trying to get them to become loyal. Sometimes you just have to let them go.