Content area
Full Text
Some customers are harder to please than others, so analyze satisfaction scores carefully.
When assessing customer satisfaction, marketers need to understand their customers' thresholds or they might get a false impression. The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) demonstrates consistent differences in levels of satisfaction among socioeconomic and demographic groups, irrespective of the industries that customers are evaluating. Four significant differences based on sex, age, socioeconomic status, and metro or non-metro residence hold across 40 measured industries. Apparent differences by racial and ethnic groups disappear when education level is controlled.
Private sector companies, nonprofit organizations, institutions, and government agencies are increasingly driven by customer satisfaction. In the drive to make both management and employees customer-driven, customer satisfaction measures are being used to:
Make resource allocation decisions.
Determine which quality improvements customers are willing to pay for.
Monitor strategic goals.
Assess the competition.
Reward management and employees.
Evaluate the success of specific product lines, brands, and business units within companies.
A growing number of companies are tying compensation-at least in part-to improvements in measured customer satisfaction. Lucky is the manager whose customer base shifts towards a larger proportion of women, or towards older customers, from one year's evaluation period to the next. Women are easier to please than men whether your company produces canned food or automobiles. The tough-to-satisfy customer is the upscale, educated, young male.
Compensation formulae are not the principal use of customer satisfaction measures-only one of the more recent uses. In a competitive environment, companies use customer satisfaction measures to benchmark against competitors, to identify strengths and weaknesses of product lines, and to assess which customer segments are more likely to be profitable because they like what the firm produces or markets.
Retaining customers by pleasing them proves to be more profitable than acquiring new ones because of the attendant marketing and account startup costs. Even noncompeting government agenciespressed by irate taxpayers and vigilant legislatorsare increasingly driven by customer satisfaction.
Besides its uses for evaluation, customer satisfaction tracking can determine the effects of quality improvements, provide a "How are we doing?" report card over time, and become tools for developing marketing strategies and for managing the customer base as a corporate asset. But users beware: Fundamental differences in levels of satisfaction need to...