Customer satisfaction: it is dead but it will not lie down

Customer satisfaction with service companies is probably declining steadily across the developed world because it no longer matters to most people. Investors favour companies that lock in their customers irrespective of their satisfaction levels. CEOs are concerned primarily with their share price and their image, and customer satisfaction hardly influences either of these. Line managers demand that customers be profitable irrespective of their attitudes. Marketeers are finding that new technologies open up far more promising possibilities for studying both customer purchasing behaviour and the reasons behind it than satisfaction ever did. Finally, customers are being rewarded more and more for their dissatisfaction rather than their satisfaction. The only group keeping the consumer satisfaction concept alive is middle managers, who are still conditioned by their weekly fix of satisfaction statistics.