Customer Satisfation

CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

What is customer satisfaction?

Customer satisfaction is a measurement of customer attitudes about products, services and brands. While it's always been smart to keep customers happy, the term "customer satisfaction" became popularized in the 1980's with the total quality movement. Customer satisfaction involves determining the degree to which a company’s products or services meet the requirements of the end user. Companies that are certified ISO 9001:2000 must now demonstrate how they measure customer satisfaction, and how they are improving in this area. Firms planning to become ISO certified will need to begin developing these capabilities. Increasing competition (whether for-profit or nonprofit) is forcing businesses to pay much more attention to satisfying customers. Customer satisfaction is an ambiguous and abstract concept and the actual manifestation of the state of satisfaction will vary from person to person and product/service to product/service. The state of satisfaction depends on a number of both psychological and physical variables which correlate with satisfaction behaviors such as return and recommend rate. The level of satisfaction can also vary depending on other options the customer may have and other products against which the customer can compare the organization's products.

Satisfaction is basically a psychological state, care should be taken in the effort of quantitative measurement, although a large quantity of research in this area has recently been developed. Work done by Berry, Brodeur between 1990 and 1998 defined ten 'Quality Values' which influence satisfaction behavior, further expanded by Berry in 2002 and known as the ten domains of satisfaction. These ten domains of satisfaction include: Quality, Value, Timeliness, Efficiency, Ease of Access, Environment, Inter-departmental Teamwork, Front line Service Behaviors, Commitment to the Customer and Innovation. These factors are emphasized for continuous improvement and organizational change measurement and are most often utilized to develop the architecture for satisfaction measurement as an integrated model. Work done by Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry between 1985 and 1988 provides the basis for the measurement of customer satisfaction with a service by using the gap between the customer's expectation of performance and their perceived experience of performance. This provides the measurer with a satisfaction "gap" which is objective and quantitative in nature. Work done by Cronin and Taylor propose the "confirmation/disconfirmation" theory of combining the "gap" described by Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry as two different measures (perception and expectation of performance) into a single measurement of performance according to expectation. According to Garbrand, customer satisfaction equals perception of performance divided by expectation of performance.

Why should we strive to satisfy customers?

Perhaps this is a rhetorical question but nevertheless we should be clear about the answer. It is not because we want them to go away happy, it is because we want them to come back and spend more money! Customers have more choice than ever before about suppliers and they are becoming increasingly aware of their power. Poor levels of service in consumer and industrial markets are not tolerated for long except where a monopoly exists and thankfully there are not many of those left. Achieving high levels of customer satisfaction will result in a wide range of benefits which grow your business and this is why it should be our primary focus.

What are the benefits of determining customer satisfaction?

The need to determine customer satisfaction will vary somewhat by the competitive circumstances of a given industry. In intense consumer-focused activities, measuring customer satisfaction is critical. But every company in every industry can benefit by examining the needs of their customers. Some of the areas where improvement may be expected include:

• Better determination of customer uses and needs.

• Identification of problems with customer services.

• A sharper focus on areas having the greatest need for improvement.

• Gaining insight for new products and/or service offerings.

WHAT DRIVES CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

• TRUST -PRODUCT IS PURE

-PRODUCT