Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
- Albert Einstein

I work with many companies of many sizes through my consulting business. When HostGator offered me the opportunity to conduct a customer satisfaction survey for them, I jumped at the chance. Even though customer satisfaction as a topic profoundly interests me, I have generally held the view that numbers themselves are painfully boring. I’ve never liked math and I have always felt that numbers are things that are best left to the experts who actually like numbers.

Over the last two weeks, though, I’ve been immersing myself in numbers – especially numbers relating to customer satisfaction. HostGator has sent out nearly ten thousand surveys to random customers and people who have completed live chats. The result? A lot of data (and a lot of numbers) on what HostGator’s customers think of the company and how its doing.

Fortunately, the results we gathered from all that data were neither shocking nor surprising. While there were no astonishing revelations, there was data that confirmed what HostGator thought based on gut feeling and there was data that showed everyone some interesting trends and correlations. …