Customer Loyalty
Customer satisfaction surveys often try to predict behaviour, namely repeat purchase. At the bottom of this is the implicit assumption that satisfied customers are also loyal customers.
In actual fact, customer satisfaction only partly explains customer loyalty. Many other additional factors play just as important a role, because customers often switch providers/suppliers even though they're satisfied. And what good is the most satisfied customer if they take their money to your competitors? This is why Vocatus always includes customer loyalty as a key parameter in the design of customer satisfaction surveys.
Customer Loyalty Instead of Customer Retention
Customer loyalty is the intensity of the relationship between customer and provider/supplier at a rational and emotional level. It goes beyond actual customer retention. In other words, we aren't interested whether the customer stays or not, but whether they want to stay of their own free will.
And this is for a good reason: unsatisfied customers do stay, but often harm you more because they put other customers off. This means that not every customer should be retained at any price. This also applies to customer segments that your company can't profitably serve.
Multi-dimensional Measurement
Customer satisfaction alone doesn't adequately explain customer loyalty. One has to consider numerous extra factors that won't be illuminated by asking about the willingness to recommend your company or switch to another. In the case of private clients, a high degree of aversion to risk or plain lack of interest in searching elsewhere for an alternative can definitely have a beneficial effect upon customer loyalty.
On the other hand, despite excellent satisfaction scores, it can happen that your company doesn't succeed in extending the business relationship with a specific partner. This might be due to the fact that the partner doesn't want to make themselves dependent on just one, or very few, providers/suppliers, no matter how satisfied they are
The measurement of customer loyalty thus always depends on the already existing relationship between customer and provider/supplier, which we initially analyse with you in just as much detail as the typical decision-making process. The result of this analysis, together with our experience drawn from countless loyalty studies in various sectors in the private and business segments, influences how we conceive the survey design.
We thereby satisfy the need for standardisation and comparability as well as the demand for a tailor-made, individual research approach.
Churn Rate Analyses
In churn rate analyses, Vocatus investigates the reasons why customers become or remain inactive or terminate the contractual relationship with the company. In markets with contractual ties, such as insurance or mobile phones, we investigate the events that make customers quit, and which decision-making process they go through.
Analysing customers' experiences with the help of Online Diaries 
can also provide information about their reasons for switching. Based upon this, we deduce concrete recommendations about how the company can retain customers.
The evaluations naturally differentiate in accordance with the various segments so that you know which customer segments are likeliest to switch. The company can then retain these customers via various sales and marketing measures.
Ascertaining Cross-selling Potentials
Just because a customer regularly buys certain products or services from a company doesn't mean that they don't also regularly buy competitor products.
We therefore find out the percentage of their entire budget for this product group that the customer spends on competitor companies (share of wallet). By analysing these reasons, it is possible to deduce concrete measures to promote cross-selling and increase sales.
Surveys of Business Customers
Customer retention is often even more important in the business-to-business sector than it is with end customers. At the same time, customer surveys in the B2B sector are especially complex, and require market researchers to have considerable knowledge of the sector and carefully ascertain how people are canvassed for their opinions, because with business customers it's usually not just one person who's making the decision.
In order to find out about this decision in a meaningful way, and later be able to influence it too, the decision-making process must therefore be duly illustrated in the project design. This is why qualitative pre-studies are particularly important here: in them, the sales specialists in your company contribute their experience to the survey.
Special qualities are also demanded of the interviewers, who have to be acknowledged as competent interlocutors on the basis of their personality and professional experience in the area of business customers. For this reason, Vocatus as a rule always works with its own interviewers who possess the necessary expertise in the sector plus experience of interviews so as to be able to interview your customers as equals.