Customer retention cannot work without “customer satisfaction” or “customer success”.

What is customer retention? That’s our wish that customers remain loyal and buy from us for a very long time to come.

Why is that important? Because it’ll give us steady and predictable revenues! Apart from that, loyal long-standing customers tend to introduce their friends, family members, and associates to our products and services as well.

That is always nice because those people become easy future customers.

What is customer satisfaction on the other hand? That’s the business function that should be concerned about whether your customers are happy or not.

What about customer success? It’s the business function that should be concerned with whether your customers are achieving the goals, results and promises that your product or service claims to deliver.

If you sell baby nappies that promise to keep babies fresh and dry for 3 hours, but mummy has to keep changing the baby every hour because the baby has peed, then you have a BIG customer success problem.

In this case CUSTOMER SUCCESS and CUSTOMER SATISFACTION are strongly correlated because mummy is unhappy over how many diapers she has to change all through the day. She is unhappy because these diapers don’t work as well as they should.

How does all this affect customer retention?

If mummy is unhappy and unsuccessful with your diapers, how long do you think she’ll remain a customer of yours?

Not very long!

That’s the reason why the key to sorting out customer retention is to pay attention to the customer satisfaction and customer success functions in your business.

Customers who are unhappy and unsuccessful with your products or services won’t hang around for very long... except if you’re a monopoly and utility like NEPA/ PHCN power companies, water board, etc. In these cases your customers won’t go anywhere because they have ABSOLUTELY NOWHERE ELSE TO GO!

If you’re not in these industries, then you better take customer success and customer satisfaction VERY seriously.