Hard measures look back to evaluate activities that already took place, like the number of people who came to your site last week or the number of times your site went down last month. Although hard measures are an essential starting point in your customer-satisfaction measurement efforts, they are not the finish line. Hard measures can only detect problems once they have impacted your company and its bottom line. For example, if your customer service has taken a turn for the worse, you might not know that you have a problem until thousands of customers stop coming to your site. By then, it's too late to convince them to come back.
People are generally very resistant to change.
Market research consistently shows that the average person is willing to feel dissatisfied for some period of time before they look for a new supplier. That's where the soft measures come in. Soft measures are your customers' feelings and opinions. They tell you what people are happy with and what's driving them nuts. Soft measures are predictive in nature because they identify problems that might cause future changes in customer behavior.