Loyalty or satisfaction. These terms are often confused. Are you loyal when you are satisfied or is it the other way around? We give an explanation in this blog post.
The most important difference is that customer satisfaction focuses on meeting expectations that lie in the past. Satisfaction shows what your customers think about your delivered product or service.
Loyalty: focuses on the future
Loyalty does not focus on the past but rather on the future and on the degree to which a customer stays faithful to an organization. The loyalty of your customers can be evaluated in different ways: by means of a periodical survey or with the help of continuous feedback. Loyal customers are the best indicator for a stable and healthy future because of their intention to either repeat their purchase or buy extra services or goods from you.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an important KPI and management tool for measuring customer loyalty. Discover everything about NPS here.
Satisfied is different from loyal
A satisfied customer can be a loyal one, but this is not necessarily always the case. Chances are that a loyal customer is satisfied. You may expect a loyal customer to be satisfied, because the customer has the intention to buy from you again. The basis for loyalty is the ‘bond’ that your customer has with your organization, in other words how ‘faithful’ he or she is to the brand or product and to the organization. It is an ‘investment’ from the customers’ side as well as from the organization itself.
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