Customer satisfaction has received a great deal of attention for decades now. It is in fact one of the most unassailable concepts of modern management rhetoric. Not only does the idea of satisfying customers have a clear, common-sense appeal, it is also generally believed that customer satisfaction leads to loyalty and translates to higher future profits.1 For these and other reasons, customer satisfaction practices have become one of the core prescriptions for managers and organizations.2 Indeed, for many companies, customer satisfaction has become the guiding principle, as they increasingly initiate all manner of strategies and processes under its banner.
The basic idea is a sound one: True customer orientation,3 based on genuine customer understanding, will provide superior customer value and thereby superior company value. Increasingly, however, corporate customer satisfaction (CS) practices — which comprise how customer satisfaction is defined and measured, and how the resulting knowledge is used in the organization — seem to be losing their effectiveness for both companies and their customers alike. In the worst cases, companies can get stuck in a customer satisfaction rut.
Although many organizations employ rigorous and extensive CS measurements, they may be measuring the wrong variables and using the information in mainly reactive ways. The concept of customer satisfaction has been wrongly equated with the concept of quality, for... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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