Having received a great deal of attention for decades now, customer satisfaction (CS) practices have become one of the core prescriptions for managers and organizations. Indeed, for many companies, customer satisfaction has become the guiding principle, as they increasingly initiate all manner of strategies and processes under its banner. But more and more, says Fredrik Dahlsten, these practices are losing their effectiveness for companies and their customers alike.
Using qualitative research at Volvo Cars, the author illustrates how the interpretation of customer satisfaction can become skewed, employing rigorous and extensive CS measurements, but measuring the wrong variables and using the information in mainly reactive ways. Many companies have only an intrinsic CS focus — a product orientation based on attribute quality and a short-term internal perspective triggered by surveys and aimed at cost control. With an intrinsic focus, customer satisfaction is seen mostly as the absence of dissatisfaction. In contrast, an extrinsic CS focus emphasizes finding new ways to increase the positive, emotional aspects of the customer experience over time.
The author argues that managers who wish to climb out of their customer satisfaction rut must move beyond the mere measurement of quality, refocus their practices on the customer’s actual experience and formulate a comprehensive strategy for using that knowledge throughout the organization. He illustrates those concepts by showing how practices at Volvo are being improved to incorporate a greater extrinsic focus and make better use of the resulting customer knowledge.
Avoiding the Customer Satisfaction Rut
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Sofia Börjesson, Ramasubraman Krish-nan and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
1 Comment On: Avoiding the Customer Satisfaction Rut
In this scenario Perception is Reality…..
and as is often quoted in the Journal of Business Lgistics as far back as 1995:
“Customer satisfaction is fundamental to business. The degree to which customers are satisfied determines whether customers make additional purchases and recommend the company and its products to others. Improving the quality of logistics service is particularly important because it increases customer satisfaction, which in turn heightens the occurrence of strategic partnering and corporate profitability. Unfortunately, an A.T. Kearney logistics study indicates that only about 10 percent of companies are capable of totally satisfying their customers.(1) The marketing literature has focused on customer satisfaction with regard to products and services.(2) In logistics, researchers have concentrated on the effect of logistics service policy(3) on customer satisfaction. Increasing attention, however, is being paid to the aspects of logistics policy that can increase customer satisfaction. The degree to which customers are satisfied with a product is determined by the combined impact of its attributes versus its cost. An important determinant of customer satisfaction is how well the product performs. However, in competitive markets, achieving a competitive advantage by providing a product with outstanding performance is difficult. Since the major players are each striving to gain market share, product performance becomes similar.(5) Similarly, price parity can be achieved with amazing speed. Businesses can, however, have a positive impact on customer satisfaction by providing outstanding logistics services. Since high levels of logistics services are not easily copied and are sometimes ignored as a competitive tool, they can be successfully used to develop a sustainable competitive advantage.”