Customer Satisfaction & Loyalty Research
Most satisfaction programs tell you the score moved. Far fewer tell you which of the forty things you could fix would actually move it back or which one, left broken, will cost you the customer no matter what else you improve.
TRC Insights has designed custom satisfaction, loyalty, and retention studies since 1987 for organizations in healthcare, financial services, insurance, utilities, technology, hospitality, and B2B. We are a Philadelphia-based team of research professionals, and the person who designs your study is the person who presents the findings.
Not every driver works in both directions
Standard key driver analysis assumes symmetry that improving an attribute helps roughly as much as degrading it hurts. In customer experience, that assumption is usually wrong.
Some attributes are dissatisfiers. Customers already expect them, so meeting the expectation earns you nothing, while failing it does damage out of all proportion. Nobody praises a bank for its app being available. Everybody notices when it isn’t.
Others are satisfiers. Customers don’t expect them, so falling short costs little but delivering creates gains far larger than the attribute’s apparent importance would predict.
A linear model cannot tell these apart. Two attributes can produce identical driver scores and require opposite decisions: one needs to be defended, the other is where growth is. TRC’s asymmetry analysis separates them, so the investment case follows the actual shape of the relationship rather than an average of it.
What This Looks Like In Practice
Our Case Studies
How TRC Measures Satisfaction & Loyalty
Every study is built around a decision, so the measures follow the decision rather than a standard template. In practice, most engagements draw on some combination of the following:
Key driver analysis: Isolating which elements of the experience actually move satisfaction and loyalty, as distinct from those that merely rise and fall alongside them. This is the difference between a correlation table and a priority list.
Asymmetry Analysis: Not every improvement has the same potential impact. TRC’s asymmetry analysis helps distinguish satisfiers, which can create meaningful gains when improved, from dissatisfiers, where poor performance can create disproportionate risk. This allows organizations to prioritize resources more effectively.
Customer journey and touchpoint research: Identifying where in the sequence of interactions the experience breaks and which breaks customers actually carry forward into their next decision.
Tracking programs: Continuous or periodic measurement built to detect real movement rather than noise, with reporting cadence matched to how quickly the business can act on it.
Linkage to business outcomes: Where a client has operational, behavioral, or financial data, connecting experience measures to it directly – as in the Radisson revenue simulator above. This requires client data access and is scoped case by case.
Which metrics we use
Overall and attribute-level satisfaction, likelihood to recommend, repurchase and renewal intent, switching risk, customer effort, perceived value, complaint-resolution satisfaction, and touchpoint-level measures. Which of these belongs in your study depends on what you will do with the answer. We would rather help you choose three that drive a decision than report sixteen that don’t.
Customer Satisfaction & Loyalty Experts
Customer Satisfaction & Loyalty - Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is the difference between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty research?
Satisfaction research measures how customers evaluate an experience they have already had. Loyalty research measures what they do next – renew, repurchase, recommend, or leave. The two are related but not interchangeable, and the gap between them is where most of the useful findings are: satisfied customers defect, and dissatisfied customers frequently stay. A study designed to explain one will not automatically explain the other.
Isn’t NPS enough?
NPS is a measurement, not an explanation. It will tell you the number moved; it will not tell you which of your operational choices moved it, or which of the available fixes is worth funding. It is a reasonable top-line indicator and a poor basis for deciding where to invest. Most of our work begins where a client’s existing score-based program stops.
How do you identify what drives customer satisfaction?
Through key driver analysis – regression and related techniques that separate attributes genuinely influencing satisfaction from those that merely move alongside it. We extend this with asymmetry analysis, which tests whether an attribute’s effect is the same in both directions, because in customer experience it usually isn’t.
Can satisfaction research be connected to revenue?
Yes, where the client can provide operational or financial data to link against. For Radisson, TRC connected several years of guest satisfaction data to monthly property revenue and built a simulator letting franchisees estimate the financial effect of a satisfaction change. This kind of linkage depends entirely on data availability and is scoped individually.
How do you choose a customer satisfaction research firm?
Four questions separate firms in this category. Will they identify drivers, or only report scores? Have they worked with your specific customer type – patients and providers behave nothing like commercial buyers? Can they connect experience data to business outcomes if you have the data to support it? And who actually does the work: the people in the pitch, or a delivery team you meet later? Ask each firm those four and the shortlist tends to sort itself.
Working out whether a custom study is worth it?
Send us the decision you’re trying to make. We’ll tell you what design would answer it – and if a simpler approach would do, we’ll say that too.