The Research Behind The Business Retention Index™

 

Does a high NPS® or satisfaction score mean a customer will stay?

No. NPS® measures likelihood to recommend. Customer satisfaction scores measure how someone feels right now. Neither one measures what actually matters: whether a customer will remain a customer.

In the early 2000s, we set out to answer a specific question: why do some genuinely satisfied customers leave, while some clearly dissatisfied customers stay? We tested this across thousands of B2B customer relationships, comparing what customers said against what they actually did next.

What is the Business Retention Index™ (BRI™)?

The Business Retention Index™ is a proprietary measurement developed by The Dunvegan Group to predict customer retention — not sentiment, not recommendation likelihood, but the actual likelihood a customer will stay or leave.

BRI™ is built on three factors, referred to together as the SPC model:

• Service Excellence — the quality of the customer’s actual experience
• Pain Tolerance — how difficult switching away from you would be
• Competitive Offerings — how customers perceive their alternatives

Each factor is drawn from how customers describe their experience in their own words — not a numeric survey response — and translated into the BRI™ grade through proprietary analysis.

How accurate is BRI™?

BRI™ isn’t a 0-10 score. It’s a grade, AAA down to F, and its accuracy shows up most clearly when you look at what happens at each tier.

Customers who score D-E-F are retained only 67% of the time — even when remediation programs are already in place. That means roughly one in three of your lowest-scoring customers will leave regardless of intervention. Customers scoring A-AAA, by contrast, are retained 94% of the time.

The gap between those numbers is the finding. BRI™’s value isn’t in confirming, after the fact, which customers were already safe — it’s in catching risk early enough to still act on it, before a relationship drops into a tier where intervention stops working.

Who developed BRI™?

BRI was developed by Anne Miner, founder of The Dunvegan Group, and her late husband and business partner, Olev Wain, who served as VP of Customer Retention R&D. Their research is documented in B2B Customer Retention – Identifying and Managing At-Risk Customers. Anne continues to hold and apply the measurement in every client engagement today.

Why doesn’t NPS® catch this?

NPS® was designed to measure advocacy, and potential growth through referrals, not retention. Our research found real, repeatable patterns where the two diverge — loyal customers who won’t recommend you due to scarcity concerns, and satisfied-sounding customers who leave anyway. NPS® cannot distinguish between them. BRI™ can.