Customer Satisfaction Evaluation : Methods for Measuring and Implementing Service Quality

The customer orientation philosophy of modern business organizations and the implementation of the main principles of continuous improvement, justifies the importance of evaluating and analyzing cust omer satisfaction. In fact, customer satisfaction isconsidere d today as a baseline standard of performance and a possi ble standardo f excellence forany business organization. Extensive research has defined several alternative approaches, which examine the customer satisfaction evaluation prob lem from very different perspectives. These approaches include simple quantitative tools, statistical and data analysis techniques, consumer behavioral models, etc. and adopt the following main prin ciples: • The data of the problem are based on th e customers’ judgments and are directly collected from them. • This is a multivariate evaluation problem given that customer’s overall satisfac tion depends on a setof variables representing product/service characteristic dimensions. • Usually, an additive formula is used in order to aggregate partial evaluations in ano verall satisfaction measure. Many of the aforementioned approaches don ot consider the qualitative form of customers’ judgments, although this information constitutes the main satisfaction input data. Furthermore, insev eral cases , the measurements are not sufficient enough to analyze in detail customer sa tisfaction because models’ results are mainly focused on a simple descriptive analysis.

This important new work provides a comprehensive discussion of the customer satisfaction evaluation problem by presenting an overview of the existing methodologies as well as the development and implementation of an original multicriteria method dubbed MUSA (MUlticriteria Satisfaction Analysis). The chief objective of MUSA is the development of a model able to evaluate the level of customer satisfaction both globally and partially for each of the characteristics or attributes of the product or service being considered. Furthermore, the method aims at providing an integrated set of results capable of analyzing customer needs and expectations and to justify their satisfaction level. And finally, the book examines the development of a decision support tool to help understand and apply results.

Individual chapters consider the customer satisfaction problem, presenting the various quantitative and related consumer behavioral models; quality-based approaches; the MUSA method and its extensions and advanced topics; customer satisfaction surveys and barometers; applications of the MUSA method in real-world customer satisfaction surveys; and different information technology approaches related to customer satisfaction.

Customer Satisfaction Evaluation: Methods for Measuring and Implementing Service Quality is intended for researchers and practitioners in marketing, quality management, service management, and anyone interested in applications of Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA).