Customer Satisfaction:

• 91% of unhappy customers will never purchase services from you again. ¹
• At any one time 22% of all law firm clients are considering switching firms because of problems with their legal current firm. 2
• For every customer who bothers to complain, there are 26 others who remain silent. 1
• Typically only 25-30% of a firm's clients are completely satisfied - Such low satisfaction means that 70% or more of the firm's clients may be open to pitches from competing firms. 2
• 70% of complaining customers will do business with you again if you resolve the complaint in their favour. 4
• Each one of your customers has a circle of influence of 250 people or potential customers who hear bad things about you. 1
• 96.7% of unhappy customers never let out even a squeak of dissatisfaction to the organisation that has given them bad service. . . according to research they will tell at least 15 other people, while satisfied ones will tell six at the most. ⁵
• Almost 70% of the identifiable reasons why customers left typical companies had nothing to do with the product. The prevailing reason for switching was poor quality of service. 7

Client Retention:

• It costs about five times as much to attract a new customer as it costs to keep an old one. 1
• Raising customer retention rates by 5% could increase the value of an average customer by 25-100%. 6
• The probability of selling service to a new customer is 1 in 16, while the probability of selling service to a current customer is 1 in 2. 2
• Loyal customers who refer others generate business at very low or no cost. 2
• It's easier to get present customers to buy 10 percent more than to increase your customer base by 10 percent. 4
• The local pizzeria customer's lifetime value is $8,000. To a car dealership, over $300,000! Cadillac's own estimates on a customer's worth? $332,000 - taking into account the number of new vehicles a customer will buy, and the service fees they'll pay. General Motors puts the figure at $400,000+! 3
• A typical supermarket customer's worth? $380,000! 3
• The average business loses between 10 percent and 30 percent of its customers each year. 4
• If a credit card company can hold onto another 5% of its customers each year (increasing retention rate from, say, 90 to 95%), then the total lifetime profits from a typical customer will rise, on average, by 75%. 6

Measuring Customer Satisfaction:

• 96-100% of clients interviewed say they approve of client satisfaction surveys. 2
• 60% of clients interviewed in person will give a firm new business within 60 days of the survey. 2
  

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Article References:

1. The White House Office of Consumer Affairs (http://www.articlesfactory.com/articles/business/5-ways-to-keep-your-customers-coming-back-for-more.html)
2. Earl Sasser of Harvard Business School and Merry Neitlich of Extreme Marketing
3. TARP (http://www.tarp.com/index.html)
4. Eastbridge Consulting Group (http://www.eastbridge.com/news/oi2000/sum007.htm)
5. Karl Albrecht (The Service Advantage, Dow Jones, New York, 1990, p. 199)
6. Frederick F Reicheld (The Loyalty Effect, Harvard Business School Press, 1996 Chapter 2 - The Economics of Customer Loyalty)
7. Forum Corporation research (http://www.crforum.co.uk/)