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Customer Satisfaction

Increasingly, business is concerned with achieving a high level of service quality among customers. At the same time, as customers have become more knowledgeable, sophisticated and time-pressed, they are demanding better products and services with excellent follow-up. In a competitively charged marketplace, dissatisfied clients often will not state their complaints, but simply "vote with their feet", leaving companies knowing that the customer has moved on, yet not knowing exactly why.

Customer satisfaction or service quality research can help define the attributes that your customer associates with good service and determine areas of weakness that undermine your competitive edge. Customer satisfaction research can evaluate everything from after-market service and responsiveness to complaints to convenience of hotel check-in and timeliness and accuracy of courier services. As well as assessing customer expectations, quality research can include employee attitude surveys to determine how customer relations staff perceive programs to monitor customer satisfaction.

Often designed as tracking studies, customer satisfaction research can be conducted at regular intervals against a benchmark to reflect trends and changes in service performance.

An Example

Issue

An automobile manufacturer has had many complaints about the quality of CD player installed as a factory option in its cars, particularly the sporty models favoured by young adults. Apparently it eats CDs and eventually stops altogether. Although the manufacturer honours its warranty on these items and replaces them promptly, dealerships report that customers who have had the problem players continue to complain. What is going on here?

Solution

It turns out that the manufacturer is replacing the defective CD players with the same brand and model that causes the problem in the first place. These customers travel with their music loud and fear that if they have had operating problems once with this player, they will probably recur. Service quality research among both customers and service reps at the dealerships would reveal that although the manufacturer is honouring the letter of the warranty, the customers believe that it is half-hearted compliance. Indeed they believe that a stockpile of defective players exists and that’s all they’ll get until the supply has been exhausted. Many have indicated that they will not purchase that brand of automobile again.