Measuring Donor Loyalty

Despite its weaknesses, the SERVQUAL approach gained much traction because of a mounting body of evidence of a link between customer satisfaction, loyalty and, ultimately, profitability. As researchers began to understand more of the dynamic, we learned that although this was the case, the relationship between satisfaction and loyalty was nonlinear and that behavior tended to be impacted by extremes of experience. Customers who were “very satisfied or delighted” were substantively more loyal, while customers who were dissatisfied were very unlikely to repurchase and substantively more likely to engage in negative behaviors such as bad-mouthing the organization to others.