Understanding Customer Satisfaction

In its simplest sense, customer satisfaction refers to a customer being satisfied for the service or goods s/he opts for. To do so, the service provider should meet the user’s expectations. Unless a service taker feels something is amiss, customer satisfaction seldom takes place. Eventually, enterprises are profit driven ventures. Hence, an unsatisfied customer significantly affects an enterprise’s financial inflow. As a result, in modern business era, which is fueled with neck-to-neck competition between organizations on diverse platforms, (ranging from social media to advertisements to Corporate Social Responsibilities), customer satisfaction is the key mantra.

In their article, “The three Cs of customer satisfaction: Consistency, consistency, consistency” authors Alfonso Pulido, Dorian Stone and John Strevel argue that sustaining an audience is hard. As a result, the writers express, that to sustain an audience, an enterprise requires a “consistency of thought, of purpose, and action over a long period of time.” They argue that while managers generally tend to look down upon consistency, the writers think otherwise. They opine that as customers are ever increasingly voicing their satisfaction and seeing to it that the service or product they use meets their expectations, one cannot, in no way, refrain from customer satisfaction. To do so, enterprises need to focus on consistency, the writers argue. Indeed, “(a) satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all,” Michael LeBoeuf, American Businessman and author rightly said to highlight the importance of customer satisfaction.

For me, as a consumer, key issues that seek consistency are: consistent business policies, service quality, service delivery and communication.  To elaborate the four, a consistent business policy means that an institution knows what it is doing. For example, sale of Classmate notebooks in India are far superior to other notebooks. The reason: Classmate has joined hands with a social cause. With each notebook a person buys, 2 rupees goes to educating the poor. Here, a buyer feels satisfied on two ways: firstly, the notebook is of superior quality for the price. Secondly, she has supported for a social cause.

Likewise, I believe that service quality and service delivery are two wheels of a cart in marketing. In this competitive world, no individual pays for two things: poor quality and poor service delivery. A quality service with slow service delivery or, a quick service delivery with poor quality is something that industries have to guard themselves against. Hence, industries should maintain consistent quality of a service. If possible, they should add on to their services to give them the edge. Secondly, with quality, they should also have quick service delivery. The reason, I believe is simple: people now want quality things; quicker. Service delivery, moreover, relies on the ways a service is rendered. As people continually have lesser free time, people are drifting away from traditional service usage of queeing. People now want efficiency and action in best possible quickest means: cell phones, World Wide Web, social media. Hence, the better and stronger the service delivery with quality service, the more satisfied a customer tends to be.

Lastly, but another important aspect of customer satisfaction is communication. One of the key marketing strategies is to stay in touch with its customers. An enterprise first, must effectively communicate its vision to the masses. Secondly, they have to ensure that customers understand their meaning as stated through queries via emails, phone call or surveys. Finally, they continually need to stay in touch with their audience, even after a customer buys or uses a service.  Hence, customer satisfaction are important for 6 reasons.

-          It is a leading indicator of consumer repurchase intentions and loyalty -          It is a point of differentiation -          It reduces customer churn -          It increases customer lifetime value -          It reduces negative word of mouth -          It is cheaper to retain customers than to acquire new ones (http://blog.clientheartbeat.com/why-customer-satisfaction-is-important/)

Some theories of Customer Satisfaction:

The Dissonance Theory:  The theory suggests that a person who expected a high-value product and received a low value product would recognize the disparity and experience a cognitive dissonance (Cardozzo, 1965). What this means is, when a customer uses a service which is assumed to be of superior quality, but ends up to be inferior, the customer tends to repent on the time and price she has paid to use the service. It then creates a psychological discomfort between a customer and a product.

The Contrast Theory: The theory is opposite to the dissonance theory. The theory expresses that when a product falls short to a customer’s expectation, the contrast between expectation and outcome will lead customers to exaggerate the disparity (Yi, 1990). The theory maintains that a customer who receives a product less value than expected, will magnify the difference between the product expected and the product received (Cardozzo, 1965)

The Comparison Theory: The theory maintains that there are numerous detriments for a customer to opt for one service or product against others. When dealing with customer satisfaction, the theory argues to look upon the following areas; 1) consumers’ prior experiences with similar products, 2) expectations produced by a situation (those created by advertisements and promotional efforts) and 3) the experience of other consumers who serve as referent persons. The theory argues that prior to using any service or product, consumers compare against other products, user opinions, referrals, advertisements and so forth.