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Morris, Vovici's senior vice president of marketing and operations for satisfaction research, was a source for the Marketing News Core Concepts article "Measure for Measure: The Pros and Cons of Formal and Informal Customer Satisfaction Measurement," out in our Oct. 30th issue. He's also the co-presenter of an American Marketing Association webcast "The Customer Satisfaction Survey: Measuring Customer Experience to Build Customer Loyalty."

In our interview, Morris broke down a few different metrics used to gauge customer satisfaction levels. Alas, there wasn't enough space to fit it to print, but that's where this handy blog comes in.

Here are Morris' reviews of three different metrics:

1. CSAT: “That’s often based around a question such as, ‘How satisfied are you with your experience?’ … That’s an all right metric for understanding satisfaction, but it doesn’t help you understand what the growth potential is for a given customer.”

2. ACSI: “It’s the most well known customer satisfaction [metric]. It will take the response to a few different questions: ‘What is your overall satisfaction?,’ ‘What extent did it meet your expectations?’ and ‘How well does it compare to the ideal?’ … There’s a lot of benchmarking data … but there’s not much focus with ACSI around the likelihood to buy more or recommend [a product or service].”

3. Net Promoter: “It’s gotten a lot press. It’s been called the ultimate question: ‘How likely is it that you would recommend a company to a friend or colleague?’ … From a CEO perspective there are so many metrics that are tracking across different parts of the business. … In that respect, [Net Promoter] is attractive. … The problems are it doesn’t work well in an industry without a lot of competitors, and it doesn’t accurately differentiate promoters or detractors.”

Look for "Measure to Measure" in our October 30th issue (members should have it already, or will get it soon) and on MarketingPower.com in the near future.