Beyond customer satisfaction.

• Author: Motley, L. Biff
• Position: Banking Marketing Industry's Customer Relations

Recent articles in the American Banker and The Wall Street Journal have focused on the importance of going beyond tracking of customer satisfaction. They talk about taking the extra step of gauging "client loyalty." The idea here is that banks are seeking ways to generate organic top-line growth in revenue and that "beyond-satisfied" clients will express their pleasure by buying more of the new products that bankers are busily concocting and marketing.

This is certainly a sound idea and one that has worked well in other retail enterprises. Take Starbucks. That company is now one of the country's leading sellers of music CDs to its very successful strategy of assembling the musical favorites of well-know musicians and selling them right there at the "barista" stand.

Well-satisfied customers will buy more, and this is what bankers are after also. So, with so much riding on this, doesn't it pay to construct a good feedback loop to make sure it's working as planned? Here are three simple customer feedback concepts.

* First, you should put in place a periodic customer satisfaction survey. These are simple and easy to do and look much like the little survey cards you get when you pay your tab at a nice hotel or restaurant. The key to this type of input is to do it consistently and to track your results in the very same way over time. This will allow you to see whether you are getting better or worse. Banks that are good at this typically conduct the survey in their monthly statements on a quarterly or twice-yearly basis.

* The second and increasingly popular form of feedback survey focuses on the issue of customer loyalty. Loyalty questions typically get at whether the client will buy more products from the bank and recommend the bank to...