Organizations invest in customer loyalty and relationship management programs for the decision support they offer. Customer loyalty measurement gives organizations an external assessment of whether they are performing well in the eye of customers. Once business managers understand how customers perceive their products and services, they use this insight to refine their operations and other elements of the customer experience to increase loyalty and retention.

Because they directly affect these business-critical decisions, investments in measurement programs must be supported by proof that improvements in customer loyalty programs actually produce improved financial performance for the firm. Increasingly, senior management, shareholders, and other organizational stakeholders demand evidence of the bottom-line impact of customer loyalty measurement initiatives. These stakeholders seek evidence that investments in managing relationships with customers, as well as those made in relevant process and quality improvements, actually contribute to growth in revenues, profitability, and other financial and market performance indicators. Similarly, many business managers have keen interest in identifying strategies that not only maximize, but also optimize customer loyalty. These various forms of validation and financial impact form the foundation for linkage analysis.

Linkage Analysis is the process of connecting multiple sources of organizational data to provide enhanced decision support that can improve the overall performance of the organization. Typically, such data include customer loyalty measures, financial data, employee data, internal process data, and/or channel partner data. These multiple streams of information are combined to do the following:

• Quantify the strength of the relationship between overall customer attitudes and customer behavior, and ultimately the financial performance of the firm
• Identify the key employee and internal-process drivers that can foster higher customer loyalty, retention and growth in the marketplace.

One of the key outputs of Linkage Analysis is an ROI-driven decision support simulator (FISCAL^®) designed to provide management with the ability to combine and link several critical sources of business information (customer satisfaction surveys, financial performance measures, investment requirements, and managerial judgment) into a single tool for selecting optimal customer retention strategies. More specifically, the FISCAL^® simulator is designed to:

• Establish the presence or absence of linkages between product and/or service quality perceptions and financial outcomes
• Determine the strength and leveragability of such relationships
• Evaluate alternative product and service improvement strategies for managerial action based on expected financial return to the enterprise through an investment versus return analysis.

The FISCAL^® simulator is typically built for a client as one of the final stages of a Linkage Analysis initiative. FISCAL^® provides a user friendly, hands-on interface to integrate various organizational elements spanning both costs and benefits of different strategies. Burke consultants work closely with clients first to build the FISCAL^® simulator based on insights gleaned from Linkage Analyses, and then to deploy the simulator to assist managerial decision making. FISCAL^® is used to integrate the "voice of the customer" (via customer survey data), the "voice of the process" (via internal data on customer value and process costs), and the "voice of management" (via managerial judgment about organizational readiness and the ability to implement process improvement). In sum, FISCAL^® helps organizations make better, more informed decisions about where to invest limited resources in order to optimize customer retention, loyalty, and profitability.

Over the last decade, Burke has led the industry in dedicating substantial resources to establish best practices in Linkage Analysis for many clients across a wide variety of industries. Burke's Linkage Analysis process, often preceded by Linkage Assessment, is robust and customizable to each individual project depending on the scope and definition of the assignment. For each project, Burke applies a technique that best addresses the company's information needs and data constraints (e.g., the volume of data, the existence of missing data, use of different survey scale types, etc.). Together, Burke's extensive experience across various industries, the application of a robust process, and expertise with an expansive suite of analytical techniques makes Burke the leader in linking various streams of data to provide enhanced decision support to organizations.