MIT Sloan Management Review

Marketing, Service and Quality

Customer Satisfaction Fables

By Dawn Iacobucci, Kent Grayson and Amy Ostrom

July 15, 1994

CAN A COMPANY CONSTANTLY STRIVE TO EXCEED CUSTOMERS’ EXPECTATIONS BY PROVIDING SERVICE THAT “DELIGHTS” OR “AMAZES” THEM? OR IS THIS JUST another marketing trend that really doesn’t ensure that the customer will purchase the service again? Are customers always right, or are there some who may not be profitably worth satisfying? Do customers judge service on the core offering (e.g., the plane flight) or on the supplemental “frills” (e.g., the movie and meal during the flight)? The authors point out that the concept of customer satisfaction is nothing more than good marketing, something companies should have been striving for all along. They poke holes in a number of marketing trends and suggest that, rather than embracing every new fad that comes along, managers should think creatively and choose their own paths to successful marketing.

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In the 1980s, U.S. manufacturers turned to quality as a way to create competitive advantage and sustain customer loyalty. The 1990s are emerging as the era for customer satisfaction in service industries. Service quality and customer satisfaction are important to marketers because a customer’s evaluation of a purchase is thought to determine the likelihood of repurchase and, ultimately, to affect bottom-line measures of business success. Customer satisfaction is important to all marketers, but especially to service marketers, because, unlike their manufacturing counterparts, they have fewer objective measures of quality for judging their production.

In particular, service marketers have embraced the “gap model,” which suggests that consumers will judge a service encounter as high quality if the experience exceeds his or her expectations. This concept is simple and intuitively appealing; it is consistent with our own experiences as consumers who have been frustrated by service that did not meet our expectations or pleasantly surprised by the service provider who “went the extra mile” for us and performed “above and beyond the call of duty.”

Simple ideas are often those that “catch on” fastest, and, true to form, the gap concept is popular in industry and academia. Books on customer service invariably feature examples of service providers who made extra efforts to please their customers. Furthermore, it is currently in vogue for managers in many industries to make... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.

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