Customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and customer retention are three different constructs, and they correlate far more weakly than most dashboards imply. A finding widely cited in loyalty research — associated with Fred Reichheld's work and the Harvard Business Review loyalty literature of the 1990s — holds that…

Customer satisfaction is the degree to which a product, service, or interaction meets or exceeds a customer's expectations, usually measured as a snapshot at a specific moment in the relationship.