A Complete and Balanced Service Scorecard: Creating Value Through Sustained Performance Improvement

Chapter 10. Retention and Growth

Customer retention is an important aspect of any service business. The present literature has a plethora of information about the ways to measure customer satisfaction. Customers are the raison d’être for any for-profit firm. At a majority of the service firms, customers rank above any other shareholders. However, customer management has more often been an art. Customer metrics are often not correlated with the corporate performance metrics and are not that well defined. Managers most often rely on financial metrics.

Customer satisfaction, retention, customer equity, and lifetime value are some of the commonly used metrics. All of these metrics could also be classified as observable (or behavioral) and unobservable ...