One of the basic assumptions that have been considered sacrosanct
is high levels of customer satisfaction lead to increased market share. Some recent research suggests that there this
assumption may not be universally true.
The research was published in September, 2013 Journal of Marketing
titled “Reexamining the Market Share-Customer Satisfaction Relationship”. The authors are Lopo L. Rego, Neil A. Morgan
and Claes Fornell. The authors have
found “a consistently significant negative market share – customer satisfaction
relationship.”
Some points of interest made by the authors are: (i) Customer
satisfaction is generally not predictive of a firm’s future market share, but (ii)
Market share is a strong negative predictor of a firm’s future customer
satisfaction.
The research suggests that as companies grow larger their customer
satisfaction lessens. Success generally
leads from an aggressive “take care of the customer policy” to a bureaucratic,
procedurally structured organization that establishes a policy to have the “highest level of
customer satisfaction in the industry benchmark.”
While these might appear to be the same, one is “customer focused” and
the other is “system focused”.
From this perspective there is a paradox that appears; namely,
high customer satisfaction may influence growth in market share but as companies
grow and systematize their customer interface, satisfaction may decline and
ultimately have little or no effect or impact on market share.
The bottom line is that size, bureaucracy, policies and
procedures can take the energy out of a customer relationship. As a company grows, it must be aware that the
customer relationship can be diminished when the individual customer is not as
important as the metric of customer satisfaction.
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