Customer satisfaction
[4][5][6] However, traditionally applied satisfaction surveys are influence by biases related to social desirability, availability heuristics, memory limitations, respondents' mood while answering questions, as well as affective, unconscious, and dynamic nature of customer experience.
[1] Customer satisfaction is viewed as a key performance indicator within business and is often part of a Balanced Scorecard.
[1] The authors also wrote that "customer satisfaction data are among the most frequently collected indicators of market perceptions.
Their principal use is twofold:" [1] 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.
Day (1977) underlined different types of expectations, including ones about costs, the nature of the product, benefits, and social value.
"[11] In some research studies, scholars have been able to establish that customer satisfaction has a strong emotional, i.e., affective, component.
Churchill and Suprenant in 1982, evaluated various studies in the literature and formed an overview of Disconfirmation process in the following figure:" [11] Organizations need to retain existing customers while targeting non-customers.
'"[1] As research on consumption experiences grows, evidence suggests that consumers purchase goods and services for a combination of two types of benefits: hedonic and utilitarian.
In an empirical study comparing commonly used satisfaction measures it was found that two multi-item semantic differential scales performed best across both hedonic and utilitarian service consumption contexts.
In the study,[21] the six items asked respondents’ evaluation of their most recent experience with ATM services and ice cream restaurant, along seven points within these six items: “pleased me to displeased me”, “contented with to disgusted with”, “very satisfied with to very dissatisfied with”, “did a good job for me to did a poor job for me”, “wise choice to poor choice” and “happy with to unhappy with”.
In the study, respondents were asked to evaluate their experience with both products, along seven points within these four items: “satisfied to dissatisfied”, “favorable to unfavorable”, “pleasant to unpleasant” and “I like it very much to I didn’t like it at all”.
[23] Again, the respondents were asked to evaluate their experience on both ATM services and ice cream restaurants, along seven points within “delighted to terrible”.
[26] The study found a 'regression to the mean' effect in customer satisfaction responses, whereby the respondent group who gave unduly low scores in the first survey regressed up toward the mean level in the second, while the group who gave unduly high scores tended to regress downward toward the overall mean level in the second survey.
[27] On the microeconomic level, academic studies have shown that ACSI data is related to a firm's financial performance in terms of return on investment (ROI), sales, long-term firm value (Tobin's q), cash flow, cash flow volatility, human capital performance, portfolio returns, debt financing, risk, and consumer spending.
In addition to quarterly reports, the ACSI methodology can be applied to private sector companies and government agencies in order to improve loyalty and purchase intent.
Power and Associates provides another measure of customer satisfaction, known for its top-box approach and automotive industry rankings.
Power and Associates' marketing research consists primarily of consumer surveys and is publicly known for the value of its product awards.
These include A.T. Kearney's Customer Satisfaction Audit process,[32] which incorporates the Stages of Excellence framework and which helps define a company’s status against eight critically identified dimensions.
In the European Union member states, many methods for measuring impact and satisfaction of e-government services are in use, which the eGovMoNet project sought to compare and harmonize.
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 dissatisfaction.
[38] A 2022 report found that consumer experiences in the United States had declined substantially in the 2 years since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
[39] In the United Kingdom in 2022, customer service complaints were at record highs, owing to staffing shortages and the supply crisis related to the COVID pandemic.
