Marketing Research 200
Curtin University
Rebecca Licacristi Budianto
15359111
Meaning of
Satisfaction and Measurement
Introduction
Satisfaction is a word that has a broad meaning. The
meaning of satisfaction can be for sense of achievements, expectations,
fulfillments, opportunity to redress and more. Satisfaction concept can be
measure, but it is not easy as it is relates to people’s perceptions that built
based on customer experience. There are many types of satisfaction and
satisfaction in marketing term is customer satisfaction. This report will be
discussing about customer satisfaction in more specific way and also the ways
to measure customer satisfaction concept.
Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is a way to measure whether the
product or service that being offered success to meet or fails to meet or even
goes beyond customer’s expectations (Abdallat and Emmam 2012, 1). There are
many definitions for customer satisfaction but all have the same meaning.
Customer satisfaction depends on the quality and effects of their experiences
that is affected by customer expectations with the products or services they
receive or even with the organization itself (Kim, Wang and Mattila 2010, 980).
Customer satisfaction is one of the most important roles in marketing, it is
the key for businesses to survive in the market and be profitable.
Importance to
Business
The reason why businesses focus on customer satisfaction
is to determine the ways to increase the customer base, customer loyalty,
profits and revenue, market share and opportunity to survive in the market
(Customer Satisfaction 2007). For example, the competition in banking industries
is increasing. Banks become highly concern to improve the quality of services
and satisfaction of their own customers. The way banks operate also change in
order to fulfill the customer requirements to meet customer satisfaction
(Muntean and Stremtan 2011, 656).
Customer base and customer loyalty will develop through
several processes. First, the customers have to build their trust, while, trust
can be build through customer satisfaction. With customer satisfaction, it
means businesses have developed a relationship indirectly with the customers.
Relationship is important to grab the customers, to be loyal and so that
businesses have the customer base.
Factors That Affect
Customer Satisfaction
There are so many unpredictable situations where customer
might meet or not meet their satisfaction level. Uncertainty avoidance reflects
the feelings and behaviors of the individual when faced with unknown situation
(Duque and Lado 2010, 677). There are factors that affect customer satisfaction
like quality, money and time. For example, quality could be means for
satisfaction of consumer through the products offered, while, money could be
means for satisfaction where customers had spent their money and it is worth
after experience the results, and time, like satisfied by the performance of
the products or services after putting high effort to find.
Service is the main thing that might drives customer
satisfaction. The performance of customer service, positively or negatively,
will affect customer’s experience. If the customer service behaves positively
like more agreeable behavior and less quarrelsome behavior, it will create a
good experience and positively will reach customer satisfaction (Ma and Dube
2011, 87). So, both parties have to cooperate with each other on their behavior
to create a good atmosphere or feeling, especially at the first impression.
Importance of Market
Research
Many businesses spend a lot of time and money for doing a
market research. Market research is about understanding the customers.
Businesses might do online surveys, focus groups and interviews to track
customer satisfaction because customer satisfaction is a major factor for
determine marketing strategy (Munteanu, Ceobany, Bobalca and Anton 2010, 125).
Businesses should develop customer’s attitude because customer satisfaction and
customer loyalty has a strong relationship. Satisfaction will be more towards
opinion and attitude, but loyalty is about customer’s behavior and that is why
some customers did satisfied but still not come back to the retail shop
(Cacioppo 2000).
Loyal customers can do more than just keep coming back,
for example, they can do powerful advertising through word-of-mouth. The
customers who are only feel satisfied probably not doing this kind of things.
As mentioned by Dimitriadis (2010, 298), customer satisfaction is important as
a way to build a long lasting bond or relationship with the customers, which
will lead to customer loyalty. By measuring customer satisfaction, businesses
will have opportunity to understand better how to attract new customers.
Customer satisfaction depends on expectation and
perception, while expectation and perception are not permanent, it keeps
changing. To keep up with the current situations, businesses need to do
customer satisfaction survey frequently to maintain high customer satisfaction
level.
The Measurement
Customer satisfaction can be measure through customer
satisfaction rating and the results will be based on the customer response
itself. When the customers answer a customer satisfaction survey, the customer
mind-set will be from their past experiences. Cognitive and affective factors
also play the role in customer satisfaction. When a customer experience an
emotional situation, it might leave an impact in their memory and it will
influence when the customer deciding their satisfaction level (Verela-Neira,
Vazquez-Casielles and Iglesias 2010, 92).
The measurement is using a survey made up of list of
statements or questionnaires. The questionnaires structures will be based on
two aspects that are perceptions and expectations. The customers will response
based on the rating score from 1 which means very low to 5 which means very
high (Shanin and Janatyan 2011, 102). The results will determine customer’s
level of satisfaction.
Advantages of the
Measurement
The advantage of measuring customer satisfaction is able
to know how successful the businesses are in providing products or services to
the market, make the customer happy in the best way so that they tend to be
loyal and businesses can be cost efficient and effective in doing their
services (Conklin 2012). The word satisfaction itself also has different
meaning behind to customer, for example, it could be satisfaction with the
products or services performance, satisfaction because the products or services
meet their expectations and more.
Therefore, determine the score for satisfaction alone is
not enough. Understanding what might have to change in order to improve
satisfaction is the aims of the overall measurement, for example, rearrange the
customer service. It has been argued that satisfied customer has a link with
satisfied employees. Businesses can examine the service outcome by looking at
customer satisfaction. The outcome of service quality is the customer attitude
which can be negative or positive (Yang and Coates 2010, 756).
Conclusion
Customer satisfaction is not easy to achieve, it needs time
and good relationship to develop trust. Businesses need to focus on goal, to
satisfy the customer and reinforce the customer service. Customer service
quality must meet customer needs and deliver an excellent service by putting
customers first. Better service quality will lead to higher customer
satisfactions. High customer satisfaction will cause in increase in customer
demand, which will result in customer loyalty and also stronger market
performance for the businesses (Jasmand, Blazevic and Ruyter 2012, 25). The
most unsatisfied customers are the best source for learning.
References
Abdallat, Muhannad M.A, Ph.D and Hesham El - Sayed El -
Emmam, Ph.D. 2012. “Customer Satisfaction.” PhD diss., King Saud University. http://faculty.ksu.edu.sa/73944/DocLib/Customer%20satisfaction.PDF
Cacioppo, Kevin. 2000. Measuring and Managing Customer
Satisfaction. Quality Digest.
Accessed March 25, http://www.qualitydigest.com/sept00/html/satisfaction.html
Conklin, Michael. 2012. Measuring and Tracking Customer
Satisfaction. Zoomerang. Accessed
March 22, http://www.zoomerang.com/whitepapers/customersat.pdf
Customer Satisfaction. 2007. Center for the Study of Social Policy. http://www.cssp.org/publications/constituents-co-invested-in-change/customer-satisfaction/customer-satisfaction-what-research-tells-us.pdf
Dimitriadis, Sergio. 2010. “Testing perceived relational
benefits as satisfaction and behavioral outcomes drivers.” International
Journal of Bank Marketing 28 (4): 297-313.
Duque, Lola C. and Nora Lado. 2010. “Cross-cultural
comparisons of consumer satisfaction ratings.” International Marketing Review 27 (6): 676-693.
Jasmand, Claudia, Vera Blazevic and Ko de Ruyter. 2012.
“Generating Sales While Providing Service: A Study of Customer Service
Representatives’ Ambidextrous Behavior.” Journal
of Marketing 76 (20-37).
Kim, Min Gyung, Chenya Wang and Anna S.Mattila. 2010.
“The relationship between consumer complaining behavior and service recovery.” International Journal of Contemporary
Hospitality Management 22 (7): 975-991.
Ma, Zhenfeng and Laurette Dube. 2011. “Process and
Outcome Interdependency in Frontline Service Encounters.” Journal of Marketing 75: 83-98.
Muntean, Andreea and Filimon Stremtan. 2011. “Research
Regarding The Satisfaction of Bank Services Consumers at CEC Banks S.A.”
Annales Universitatis Apulensus Series Oeconomica 13 (2): 655-661.
Munteanu, Corneliu, Ciprian Ceobany, Claudia Bobalca and
Oana Anton. 2010. “An analysis of customer satisfaction in a higher education
context.” International Journal of Public Sector Management 23 (2): 124-140.
Shanin, Arash and Nassibeh Janatyan. 2011. “Estimation of
Customer Dissatisfaction Based on Service Quality Gaps by Correlation and
Regression Analysis in a Travel Agency.” International
Journal of Business and Management 6 (3): 99-108.
Varela-Neira, Concepcion, Rodolfo Vazquez-Casielles and
Victor Iglesias. 2010. “Explaining customer satisfaction with complaint
handling.” International Journal of Bank
Marketing 28 (2): 88-112.
Yang, Hua and Nigel Coates. 2010. “Internal marketing:
service quality in leisure services.” Marketing
Intelligence & Planning 28 (6): 754-769.
No comments:
Post a Comment