The satisfaction inequality

Far too often in blogs and posts regarding customer and employee retention strategies, satisfaction is equated with Loyalty. The two concepts, however, are in fact quite distinct, and conflating them can cause significant confusion.

To help understand the difference, one can think of being satisfied with a product or vendor as simply not wanting to return it--it says nothing about whether or not you want to repurchase. Being loyal to a product or vendor, on the other hand, implies not only that the product or service provides a requisite level of satisfaction (e.g. that the customer doesn't want to return it or reneg on the deal) but also that the customer wants to continue to do business with the vendor in question in the future.

So, whereas satisfaction relates to present feelings about the product or service, Loyalty has more to do with feelings about continuing a relationship. What we see then, is that there is a sort of satisfaction inequality, whereby Loyalty implies satisfaction, but not vice versa: someone can be completely satisfied yet utterly Disloyal. Keeping this distinction in mind is a helpful way to identify whether a particular article is in fact talking about Loyalty or instead relates more to satisfaction.