Final answer:
Among the options provided, customer retention is an external backward-looking metric for a company as it reflects the company's past success in maintaining its customer base.
Step-by-step explanation:
The question at hand asks us to identify an external backward-looking metric for a company. In essence, this type of metric is one that evaluates past performance and is primarily influenced by external stakeholders or the market, rather than internal company processes. The options presented are customer awareness, intent to repurchase, perceived performance, customer retention, and customer satisfaction. Of these, customer retention stands out as a metric that looks back at a company's past ability to maintain its customer base over time. It’s external because it is determined by the customers’ decisions about whether to continue doing business with the company.
To clarify, customer retention refers to a business’s ability to keep its customers over a period. A high retention rate indicates that the company has succeeded in satisfying customers well enough to keep them from switching to competitors. This is strongly influenced by past actions of the company, such as product quality, customer service, and overall customer experience. Customer retention is crucial for long-term business growth and stability because acquiring new customers can be significantly more expensive than keeping existing ones.
While customer awareness is also influenced by the market and past marketing campaigns, it does not necessarily reflect on the past interactions or transactions with the company. Intent to repurchase and customer satisfaction, on the other hand, are more forward-looking as they signal future behaviors and attitudes. Perceived performance, could be either forward or backward-looking depending on the context, but it tends to focus on the present assessment of a company's offerings. In summary, customer retention is the option that best fits the definition of an external backward-looking metric.