maybe not from the annual report, but you could chceck:

1) number of claims and complaints

2) number of sales transactions

3) positive feedbacks on blogs and social media

~~~~  the annual report does not have to cover these topics, but for sure there are indexes about customer satisfaction

good luck :)

Not from annual report data I think. Try  list of registered customers to confirm loyalty

You may refer to the supplement to annual report (see: Kaplan and Norton, 1996, p. 80), management’s discussion and analysis, and/or letters to shareholders (see: Jones, 2006, pp. 60-61), etc. You may also refer to Jones’ (2006) approach of studying customer satisfaction via annual reports.    

• Jones, M. A. (2006) A content analysis of customer satisfaction in annual reports, Journal of Consumer Satisfaction, Dissatisfaction and Complaining Behavior, 2006, 3, pp. 59-75.
• Kaplan, R. S. and Norton, D. (1996) Using the Balanced Scorecard as a Strategic Management System, Harvard Business Review, 74, 1, pp. 75-85.

Thanks for all.  Dear, Kenneth, thanks for your valuable facts. 

I don't think you could "measure" customer loyalty from annual reports due to number of reasons as below. Hardly annual reports present customer loyalty related information as in construct measures. Even if they report (in supplement) they are at very high level and you wouldn't be able identify the individual measures (or rather quantify). Further no two annual reports, report information same way hence it will be difficult for you to congregate to form the construct "Customer Loyalty". Also, the annual reports are more descriptive and are of qualitative in nature. So you wouldn't find measures in there even if they report customer loyalty. Afterall all depends on how you define your construct "Customer Loyalty" and you want to have measures as "reflective" or "formative" in your conceptual model.

I think  using secondary data and measuring of given model alone is difficult methodologically in mist case mixed approach  is advised. further , to what extent the report is detail? do the report include statistical report i.e. number of complaint and service recovery practice (number of claims and complaints); number of sales transactions positive feedback on blogs and social media etc.. but the challenge is the difference of customer behavior in terms of presenting there resentment to the company and on such blog do to human behavioral and action difference . the other issues is what type of company is it? do they have customer data sort ans some sort of data preparation ?  if so and have such detail reporting it may with limitation and subjectivity of generalization

I think it would be difficult to justify new research if merely replicating the findings of others work including any data from annual reports.  For example taking airline frequent flyer programs you would find how airlines have increased their membership number and how they are delivering "value" through partnerships but it does not reveal customer usage or customer satisfaction or test customer loyalty.  Based on my own experience, airlines are reticent to discuss their FFPs with private researchers.

This is an interesting topic. Admittedly, anticipated challenges are encountered in searching for customer satisfaction/retention information, which is not a mandatory requirement in the financial statements/annual reports. 

Nevertheless, the following paper may also be helpful, namely: the study by Wiesel et al (2008), who made use of secondary data/specified information in annual reports (pp. 4 & 6) to measure(analyse) customer retention(satisfaction) via their calculation of customer metrics method. 

• Wiesel, T., Skiera, B. and Villanueva, J. (2008) Customer Equity: An Integral Part of Financial Reporting, Journal of Marketing, 72, 2, pp. 1-14.

Thanks dear Kenneth

Hi Sivapalan, 

it is not clear from your question what is your research objective, i.e. are you interested for methodological approaches on how to extract CS/ CL from secondary data? or available secondary sources with the actual data? or both?

if the former the colleagues provided already some references. Small addition, if comparing companies use widely accepted measures, e.g. Bain's Net Promoter Score

If the latter, one source for US is the http://www.theacsi.org/customer-satisfaction-benchmarks. Free access to download customer satisfaction index data per company, industry, sector

cheers,

Vassilis

Not possible

Hi, Sivapalan:

What you're looking for perhaps can be extracted from this recent research study (Lariviere et al, 2016) that examined the relationship between customer satisfaction, loyalty intention, and shareholder value at the firm and individual customer levels. The authors also explore industry differences by using a multilevel and random-effects approach in which individual customer scores are nested within firm-level data and the estimated interrelationships are treated as random coefficients that are explained by industry characteristics.

The authors compiled a unique and detailed data set, which covers 10 years of information on 137 firms and includes a matched sample of 189,069 customers from multiple sources, such as the American Customer Satisfaction Index, the Center for Research in Security Prices, and Compustat, to yield three important insights.

First, aggregate firm-level effects may overestimate the impact that satisfaction has at the individual customer level. Second, a consideration of loyalty intention or repurchase intention as the mediator can improve our understanding of the satisfaction-shareholder value relationship and the fact that this relationship can vary across firms. Finally, the influence of satisfaction and loyalty intentions on shareholder value varies by industry!

• LARIVIÈRE, B., KEININGHAM, T. L., AKSOY, L., YALÇIN, A., MORGESON III, F. V., & MITHAS, S. (2016). Modeling Heterogeneity in the Satisfaction, Loyalty Intention, and Shareholder Value Linkage: A Cross-Industry Analysis at the Customer and Firm Levels.

Hope this helps!

Nadeem

Sivapalan,

I'm afraid drawing from recent literature, scholars have argued that the best judge of customer satisfaction [CSAT] are customers themselves. This is because they are on the receiving side of suppliers' offerings and are happy to share their experiences in such ways that suppliers can leverage on those to improve on their product/service quality for the future. On the contrary, what would one expect firms to report about their customers' satisfaction? Of course they would normally draw up very beautiful reports that suggest they are healthy whereas they are not. In summary, current literature suggest that CSAT and Loyalty studies should be explored from customers/users perspective rather than firms and should be primary and not secondary. Good luck and I am happy to help further.