CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

SHARING THE CONTENTS OF THE TERM “CUSTOMER SATISFACTION” WHAT HAD BEEN LEARNT FROM MY TINY EXPERIENCE OF 40 YEARS IN THE FIELD OF MANUFACTURING.

It means Customer satisfaction (often abbreviated as CSAT, more correctly CSat) is a term frequently used in marketing. It is a measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or surpass customer expectation. Customer satisfaction is defined as "the number of customers or percentage of total customers, whose reported experience with a firm, its products or its services (ratings) exceeds specified satisfaction goals”.

The important few branches were as follows:

·        1. Purpose

·        2. Theoretical Ground

·        3. Construction

PURPOSE:

A business ideally is continually seeking feedback to improve customer satisfaction.

"Customer satisfaction provides a leading indicator of consumer purchase intentions and loyalty”. "Customer satisfaction data are among the most frequently collected indicators of market perceptions. Their principal use is twofold:"

1.  "Within organizations, the collection, analysis and dissemination of these data send a message about the importance of tending to customers and ensuring that they have a positive experience with the company's goods and services."

2.  "Although sales or market share can indicate how well a firm is performing currently, satisfaction is perhaps the best indicator of how likely it is that the firm’s customers will make further purchases in the future. Much research has focused on the relationship between customer satisfaction and retention. Studies indicate that the ramifications of satisfaction are most strongly realized at the extremes."

On a five-point scale, "individuals who rate their satisfaction level as '5' are likely to become return customers and might even evangelize for the firm. (A second important metric related to satisfaction is willingness to recommend. This metric is defined as "The percentage of surveyed customers who indicate that they would recommend a brand to friends." When a customer is satisfied with a product, he or she might recommend it to friends, relatives and colleagues. This can be a powerful marketing advantage.) "Individuals who rate their satisfaction level as '1,' by contrast, are unlikely to return. Further, they can hurt the firm by making negative comments about it to prospective customers. Willingness to recommend is a key metric relating to customer satisfaction."

THEORETICAL PORTFOLIO:

In literature antecedents of satisfaction are studied from different aspects. The considerations extend from psychological to physical and from normative to positive aspects. However, in most of the cases the consideration is focused on two basic constructs as customers expectations prior to purchase or use of a product and his relative perception of the performance of that product after using it.

A customer's expectations about a product tell us how he or she anticipates how that product will perform. As it is suggested in the literature, consumers may have various "types" of expectations when forming opinions about a product's anticipated performance. For example, four types of expectations are identified ideal, expected, minimum tolerable, and desirable & in addition to that indicated among expectations, the ones that are about the costs, the product nature, the efforts in obtaining benefits and lastly expectations of social values. Perceived product performance is considered as an important construct due to its ability to allow making comparisons with the expectations.

It is considered that customers judge products on a limited set of norms and attributes. The researches as to manipulate actual product performance, and their aim were to find out how perceived performance ratings were influenced by expectations. These studies took out the discussions about explaining the differences between expectations and perceived performance”. 

In some research studies, scholars have been able to establish that customer satisfaction has a strong emotional, i.e., effective, component. Still others show that the cognitive and effective components of customer satisfaction reciprocally influence each other over time to determine overall satisfaction.

Especially for durable goods that are consumed over time, there is value to taking a dynamic perspective on customer satisfaction. Within a dynamic perspective, customer satisfaction can evolve over time as customers repeatedly use a product or interact with a service. The satisfaction experienced with each interaction (transactional satisfaction) can influence the overall, cumulative satisfaction. Scholars showed that it is not just overall customer satisfaction, but also customer loyalty that evolves over time.

The Dis-confirmation

"The Dis-confirmation is based on the comparison of customers’ [expectations] and their [perceived performance] ratings. Specifically, an individual’s expectations are confirmed when a product performs as expected. It is negatively confirmed when a product performs more poorly than expected. The dis-confirmation is positive when a product performs over the expectations. There are four constructs to describe the traditional dis-confirmation paradigm mentioned as expectations, performance, dis-confirmation and satisfaction”.

 "Satisfaction is considered as an outcome of purchase and use, resulting from the buyers’ comparison of expected rewards and incurred costs of the purchase in relation to the anticipated consequences. In operation, satisfaction is somehow similar to attitude as it can be evaluated as the sum of satisfactions with some features of a product”. "In the literature, cognitive and effective models of satisfaction are also developed and considered as alternatives; evaluated various studies in the literature and formed an overview of Dis-confirmation process.

CONSTRUCTION:

Organizations need to retain existing customers while targeting non-customers. Measuring customer satisfaction provides an indication of how successful the organization is at providing products and/or services to the marketplace.

"Customer satisfaction is measured at the individual level, but it is almost always reported at an aggregate level. It can be, and often is, measured along various dimensions. A hotel, for example, might ask customers to rate their experience with its front desk and check-in service, with the room, with the amenities in the room, with the restaurants, and so on. Additionally, in a holistic sense the hotel might ask about overall satisfaction 'with your stay”.

As research on consumption experiences grows, evidence suggests that consumers purchase goods and services for a combination of two types of benefits: hedonistic and utilitarian. Hedonistic benefits are associated with the sensory and experiential attributes of the product. Utilitarian benefits of a product are associated with the more instrumental and functional attributes of the product.

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.

Work done by providing 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 measures with a satisfaction "gap" which is objective and quantitative in nature. Work done which proposes the "confirmation/dis-confirmation" theory of combining the "gap" as two different measures (perception and expectation of performance) into a single measurement of performance according to expectation.

The usual measures of customer satisfaction involve a survey using a Likert scale. The customer is asked to evaluate each statement in terms of their perceptions and expectations of performance of the organization being measured.

Good quality measures need to have high satisfaction loading, good reliability, and low error variances. In an empirical study comparing commonly used satisfaction measures it was found that two multi-item semantic differential scales performed best across both hedonistic and utilitarian service consumption contexts. Finally, all measures captured both effective and cognitive aspects of satisfaction, independent of their scale anchors. Effective measures capture a consumer’s attitude (liking/disliking) towards a product, which can result from any product information or experience. On the other hand, cognitive element is defined as an appraisal or conclusion on how the product’s performance compared against expectations (or exceeded or fell short of expectations), was useful (or not useful), fit the situation (or did not fit), exceeded the requirements of the situation (or did not exceed).

SPECIAL NOTE:

Recently there has been a growing interest in predicting customer satisfaction using big data and machine learning methods (with behavioral and demographic features as predictors) to take targeted preventive actions aimed at avoiding churn, complaints and dis-satisfaction.

SUNDARAMURTHY VELMURUGAN, Leather Professional Consultant from PONDICHERRY.

a2z Leather Professional Consultancy; [email protected] & [email protected]

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