'Emotional imprint' the key to loyalty

German-based market research institute GfK is promoting a major new approach that addresses the acknowledged gap between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

According to GfK, most companies know that satisfaction does not necessarily imply loyalty, which the company has reconfirmed via a recent global R&D study which showed that the correlation between a company’s level of customer satisfaction and loyalty was only around 40%.

GfK has identified a new customer experience indicator that bridges this gap, which they have termed “emotional imprint”. GfK’s new model proves that strong emotional imprints lead to significantly lower rates of customer churn and more positive word of mouth.

By integrating the emotional imprint of the customer experience with customer advocacy, and other critical KPIs, such as Relationship Durability and Switching, GfK is accurately predicting company-level loyalty scores at a rate of 80% - double the rate of using customer satisfaction alone.

David Robbins, global lead for GfK Customer Harmonics, explains, “Our new model shows that the more memorable and vivid an experience, the stronger the emotional imprint it creates - and the higher that person’s advocacy and resistance to switching to competitors. By identifying those aspects of the experience that leave an emotional imprint, we can provide sharper, customer-centric insights on which attributes to promote, to drive loyalty and enhance customer life time value.”

Helen Zeitoun, global head of Brand and Customer Experience at GfK, added, “Through the integration of GfK Customer Harmonics with our customer experience management technology, GfK Echo, we can better enable our clients to increase their operational and tactical success in managing the customer experience at the point of service in real time.”