Loyalty
Customer Loyalty is devotion to a brand or product. It means that when faced with comparable alternatives, a user will choose our product. This choice is often emotional — a user who’s fallen in love with a product will recommend it to friends and acquaintances.
The standard metric for measuring customer loyalty is the NPS (Net Promoter Score). Its growth positively correlates with sales growth and market share expansion. This relationship, combined with the simplicity of the measurement, is precisely what made NPS so popular worldwide. That said, NPS does have its fair share of pitfalls — here’s a good article on them: «12 подводных камней Net Promoter Score».
There’s also a notable study, «The use of Net Promoter Score (NPS) to predict sales growth: insights from an empirical investigation», in which a group of researchers derived and quantitatively confirmed a positive correlation between NPS growth and sales.
Satisfaction
Customer Satisfaction is the degree to which a user’s expectations of interacting with a product match their actual experience. An important nuance here is that a regular user may encounter problems at some stages of the CJM while having no issues at others.
For example, say you decided to use Yandex Taxi, but the driver was speeding and creating a dangerous situation on the road.
Would you be satisfied with the service at the end of that ride? Probably not — you’d give the driver a low rating, and your satisfaction score would be low. In moments like these, a well-run service will try to get the details of the problem from you so it can be fixed.
Would your loyalty to the service or product change? Not necessarily. If your previous rides were comfortable, it probably wouldn’t. And if you received a refund or a promo code for your next ride, your loyalty might actually increase. This is a hypothetical example of a situation where satisfaction is low but loyalty remains high.
One of the most commonly used metrics for measuring satisfaction is CSI (Customer Satisfaction Index).
Key Takeaways
- CSI is a tactical metric; NPS is a strategic one.
- Growth in CSI positively correlates with NPS.
- CSI measures satisfaction at individual stages of the CJM, while NPS reflects the overall perception of the product as a whole.
- CSI is a rational, evaluative metric; NPS is an emotional one.
- Both CSI and NPS positively correlate with sales.