When you visit your favorite restaurant, you expect to have a nice meal.

That positive expectation, in itself, is a form of satisfaction. We call it anticipation-satisfaction.

When the host sees you and remembers your name, that’s recognition-satisfaction.

Of course, once you’ve had that tasty, filling meal, and you feel a warm glow, that outcome is also a satisfaction. It’s called need-satisfaction.

What happens when you’re so pleased with a restaurant that you go out of your way to rave about it to your friends? That’s referral or recommendation-satisfaction.

And when the restaurant manager says, “Come again,” and you reply, “You can bet on it!” you’ve expressed a recommitment, or what we call, pledge-satisfaction.

What happens when the owner gives you a free dessert just for being a great patron, and you’re surprised and delighted about it? That’s what we refer to as surprise-satisfaction.

Seeing and being seen in a trendy eatery confers an additional perk: status-satisfaction.

As you can see, dining out can lead to several forms of customer satisfaction, and I haven’t listed half of them.

Whatever our business is, we need to know whether we’re serving our customers as capably as we can, so which satisfaction definitions and measures should we use?

Defining customer satisfaction is a very important undertaking—one that even the most customer-focused companies, fail to do. If we don’t define it carefully, how can we monitor and measure it, let alone produce it on a consistent and reliable basis?

If you ask most business owners how they define satisfaction, sooner or later they’ll mention repeat business. They’ll ask, do customers come back and buy again? This is retention-satisfaction.

Retention-satisfaction is especially significant because it can be rather easily monitored, and it can be measured in dollars and cents. But it isn’t foolproof.

I wrote an article entitled, “Just Because They Buy Again Doesn’t Mean They’re Satisfied.” I pointed out that clients might feel they have no other viable choice than to buy from you. Cable television customers used to fit this profile before they could sign-up for satellite-television.

Customer service departments are known to track dissatisfaction more than satisfaction. They’ll carefully note every angry letter that comes in the mail, believing that there are perhaps 50 or 100 people who feel the same way, but who didn’t bother to write.

Paying attention to letters is fine, but the inferences we make about how many silent customers they represent, is little more than a wild hunch. Moreover, service providers shouldn’t infer that the absence of angry letters implies the presence of happy customers.

Instead of counting letters, I’d rather monitor and interpret customer satisfaction behaviors as they occur. The best time to do this is when service transactions conclude.

Why wait days or weeks to receive a letter, which only one-in-ten thousand people might write? When you monitor actual transactions, you can tap into a large, continuous universe of customers that is much more representative of feelings-at-large.

For instance, we monitor and measure at least three customer behaviors: (1) Their voice inflections; (2) The language they use to express gratitude; and (3) Their pledges to do additional business after being subtly cued to indicate this intention. (To learn more about this system, please refer to my book, Monitoring, Measuring, & Managing Customer Service: Jossey-Bass/John Wiley: 2000).

How do you measure customer satisfaction? Is it connected to real customer value? When was the last time you seriously explored alternatives?

By taking a fresh look at these questions you can create true breakthroughs. You can systematically deliver today’s satisfactions while inventing tomorrow’s.

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