Having attended Salesforce.com's annual conference, Dreamforce, last week I return to sunny Sydney thinking, what were the genuine highlights? Now, being a huge Metallica fan makes this a fairly easy decision: check out the video here. To be honest a lot of things stood out and a more detailed analysis of Dreamforce will follow, but for the purpose of this week’s blog I wanted to focus on one of the breakout sessions, 'Key KPI’s for Customer Service and Support'.

This session stood out for me because of a comment made by one of the presenters. Vala Afshar, Chief Customer Officer at Enterasys, said, in the context of the presentation, and I paraphrase here a little, "We are committed to Salesforce.com". That is a hugely powerful endorsement from a customer in front of over 200 people. This comment highlighted to me that much of the current industry discussion about customer experience measurement KPI's misses the point. Much of the current debate centres on Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Recommendation (NPS) and more recently the Customer Effort Score (CES). There is, however, very little debate about measuring the likely future behaviour or the strength of the customer's relationship with the organisation as a result of their experience.

Satisfaction is, "the fulfilment of one's wishes, expectations, or needs, or the pleasure derived from this." Compare this to Loyalty. Loyalty is, "giving or showing firm and constant support or allegiance to a person or institution." So what would you rather have, satisfied or loyal customers? Loyal customers right? But what about commitment? Commitment is, 'the state or quality of being dedicated to a cause'. Powerful stuff, and much more powerful that loyalty.

So what does this mean from a customer experience measurement perspective? Having spent over 15 years researching customer experience and brand relationships, I would argue that high satisfaction does not always lead to higher customer loyalty or commitment. Therefore, organisations need to make sure that in addition to CSAT, NPS or CES, a customer experience measurement programme should also include relevant future behaviour measures such as consideration, share of wallet or likelihood to increase spend to better link customer service experiences to positive commercial outcomes. In summary, the most important information a customer experience measurement programme should deliver is identifying which aspects of the customer interaction process drive customer future behaviour not just satisfaction.