Measuring customer satisfaction

Abstract

As U.S. businesses have become increasingly concerned with improving quality, there has been a growing effort to measure customers' level of satisfaction with products and services. This article illustrates one corporation's experience with a straightforward approach to measuring customer satisfaction. Three groups of respondents—industrial buyers, corporate sales personnel, and independent distributors—rated their satisfaction with the product and service characteristics of two competing suppliers. With relatively simple data-gathering procedures and data-analysis methods, a customer satisfaction survey can be readily implemented. The results point out current positives and negatives of the corporation's product and serve as a baseline for future tracking studies.