Customer Retention: Focus or Failure

Few companies focus on the key issues of customer satisfaction and loyalty and a large proportion measure for measurement’s sake. By moving away from traditional methods of measurement to verbal representations of service, from unacceptable through to ideal, and by trading‐off changes in one level of service against another, one can identify precise priorities for improvement. These priorities should take into account the following: importance to customers; gap between perceived and expected levels of service; customers’ priorities for improvement;and competitive performance. There is little evidence that many organizations collect the necessary information which determines what proportion of their customers are at risk and, specifically, the proportion that can be considered as being immediate or high risk.