How Customer Satisfaction Weighs on Your P&L

I created L’ÉCART to help business leaders turn around situations like the one I discussed recently over lunch with Claire, who runs a B2B services company.

One of her main concerns right now is churn: her company loses almost as many customers as it wins. It weighs on performance and on team morale alike, because at the end of the day the business is standing still. It’s the leaky-bucket feeling, the kind that wears sales teams down.

Her problem is complex, but I ask two simple questions to break it down. First, her positioning. Her answer: “Premium, priced 25% above the average of an already fiercely competitive market.”

Then I ask whether she measures customer satisfaction, and whether she tracks her Net Promoter Score (NPS). No NPS. Just a satisfaction survey, run for ISO 9001 compliance.

Before going further with her case, some groundwork.

Satisfaction doesn’t guarantee loyalty. But it’s the only measure that shows you how to improve

Have you ever kept a customer despite mediocre performance, or lost one after doing everything right?

In other words, a customer can be dissatisfied and stay, held by attachment to a relationship or a brand, or by the lack of alternatives in the market. Conversely, a customer can be satisfied and leave anyway. Your quality and your logistics can be flawless, and the customer walks, for lack of attachment or because the experience never rose above standard.

Loyalty and satisfaction are two different things, and both matter.

To make sure we speak the same language, because the words vary from one company to the next, the voice of the customer has brought together, for some twenty years now, two measures that should not be confused:

• Satisfaction. Depending on how granular the survey is, it identifies strengths and weaknesses, and turns them into areas for improvement.

• The Net Promoter Score (NPS), often presented as the loyalty metric. In reality, it measures the likelihood to recommend: a signal of loyalty, not proof of it¹.

NPS has its merits. It sets a direction, benchmarks easily against other players in the market, and tracks well over time. It also flags, and this is valuable, the customers at risk of leaving. Measured once a year it remains imperfect, but it has the advantage of existing where many companies have nothing.

At L’ÉCART, we go further. We add a repurchase-intent question, separate from the NPS, still declarative. But let’s be clear: that question, like the NPS, remains a compass and an early-warning system. Neither fixes the underlying problem.

Back to Claire. A workshop would be needed to lay out the hypotheses, sort them and prioritize them, but I offer her a first one.

Her premium positioning is sound, and understood: the market accepts it, she wins customers. The problem seems to lie elsewhere. In her customers’ minds, the performance delivered falls short of what they expect, given the price and the alternatives. Being average is not enough when you position yourself as premium. A merely satisfied customer is not a loyal one.

Xerox was the first to measure it: its completely satisfied customers were six times more likely to repurchase than its merely satisfied ones. Jones and Sasser generalized the finding across five industries in 1995². Perceived performance must clearly outpace the sector’s, or the price premium stops holding, and the customer leaves.

This is where churn weighs on the P&L, even when it looks stable. The company wins as many accounts as it loses. Revenue stays flat, but the entire sales effort is consumed replacing what walks out the door. The real cost lies elsewhere. Her fixed costs are covered by the existing portfolio. Any additional revenue would carry only its variable costs: its contribution margin would flow almost entirely through to operating income. That is operating leverage at work. And that is precisely the revenue she is not capturing. Then there is the human cost. Teams sign new business, then watch what they won walk away. Over time, the sales drive erodes.

She wants to change that.

What can Claire do?

The problem most likely comes from the gap between her promise and her execution in the field. The question is where, precisely, that gap opens up. That is exactly what a diagnostic is for.

What I recommend is to launch L’ÉCART’s DIAGNOSTIC program directly. As the name suggests, it delivers a precise diagnosis and the levers for change. It starts with face-to-face interviews, to surface the why that scores never reveal. It continues with a quantitative survey, which benchmarks her position against her direct competitors and isolates the at-risk accounts among her most profitable ones. The results feed a dashboard her teams can track, along with an executive readout that aligns her leadership team on priorities. It closes with the operational roadmap.

L’ÉCART’s goal is to anchor lasting change, not to drop off a report. That is why the client’s teams are involved from start to finish, building the work together.

This read of the field, conducted by a third party, will give her the levers to reduce churn and re-energize her teams. The years that follow are lighter: PULSE, an annual survey that tracks progress. And given her situation, a transactional NPS, measured at each interaction, to keep the day-to-day execution of her promise on track.

What about you?

Many companies run their customer portfolio without ever measuring what those customers think. And among those that do, few actually use it to decide. According to McKinsey, only 6% say their customer experience measurement truly informs their decisions³.

Do you really measure your customers’ satisfaction? Are you facing churn that weighs on your P&L without knowing exactly where, or why? Whether your customers are in France or around the world, I would be glad to talk it through with you.