Customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is a business term which is used to capture the idea of measuring how satisfied an enterprise's customers are with the organization's efforts in a marketplace.

Every organization has customers of some kind. The organization provides products (goods and/or services) of some kind to its customers through the mechanism of a marketplace. The products the organization provides are subject to competition whether by similar products or by substitution products.

The reason an organization is interested in the satisfaction of its customers is because customers purchase the organization's products. The organization is interested in retaining its existing customers and increasing the number of its customers.

Customer satisfaction is an ambiguous and abstract concept and the actual manifestation of the state of satisfaction will vary from person to person. The state of satisfaction depends on a number of both psychological and physical variables. 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.

Because satisfaction is basically a psychological state, care should be taken in the effort of quantitative measurement. 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.

The usual measures of customer satisfaction involve a survey instrument with a set of statements using a Likert Technique or scale. The customer is asked to evaluate each statement and in terms of their perception and expectation of the performance of the organisation being measured. Usability