How is that blog headline for a man bites dog storyline?  This seemingly ridiculous claim becomes more credible if you consider,

1. Customer (or Donor) satisfaction programs are mostly about remediating bad experiences. Most corporate entities use customer satisfaction to evaluate a given, isolated experience – e.g. a shopping trip, a call center interaction, an in-person service call, a hotel stay. The better programs will trigger – in some automated fashion – alerts to follow up with customers/donors who give bad scores. The idea is that the company wants to make it right.  For those who give “good” scores nothing happens since there is nothing to “make right”. This leads to the following corollary:
2. Your “top box” or very satisfied customers/donors are considered safe when in fact, there is a very high defection rate. The problem is that customer/donor satisfaction scores are not very good predictors of future behavior – especially among the “top-box” folks, those giving 8 to 10s on a 10pt scale. This means there are many of those “very satisfied” who will defect next time. In other words, many of your 8 to 10 folks are as “at risk” of defection as the 1 to 3 folks who complained about their last experience.

The solution is a single measurement system that captures historical, transaction based (i.e. customer satisfaction) AND leading indicator ratings. A good leading indicator must,

1)      Capture the donor or customer’s level of commitment, or passive agreement, to buy the brand or donate, which translates into latent or future cash flows for the organization.

2)      Be predictive of actual giving/spend or other key behaviors.

3)      Be parsimonious. If it takes 10, 20 or more questions than any notion of more frequent measurement as an indicator goes away because it is too cumbersome and expensive

The analysis from such a system can be simplified for management into a 2×2 matrix of Hi/Lo donor/customer satisfaction scores and Hi/Lo Leading Indicator scores (our measure for this is called Donor Commitment). This puts every donor into 1 of 4 segments ranging from truly “SAFE” (Hi Commitment and satisfaction) to “MAJOR RISK” (Low Commitment, Low Satisfaction).  Business rules can be applied to each of these segments to trigger a course of action ranging from automated to high-touch with goals ranging from remediation (bad, recent experiences) to referral solicitations (for high commitment, high satisfaction segments).

DonorVoice has an automated, feedback widget for non-profit websites that employs this framework to solicit feedback from website visitors and close the loop with appropriate, automated responses.  It is just one example of how this sort of approach can be simply and easily deployed to avoid the pitfalls of a satisfaction only framework.