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ABSTRACT
Despite research investigating the dissemination of customer satisfaction information within the firm and calls for companies to communicate customer satisfaction information to its stakeholders, the dissemination of customer satisfaction information to external publics has not been investigated. This research addresses this issue by investigating the occurrence of customer satisfaction measurement results in the letter to shareholders section of the corporate annual report using a sample of both product and service industries. The results indicate that quantitative customer satisfaction results are rarely included in the letter to shareholders and many letters fail to even mention customer satisfaction. The results and implications of this research are discussed as well as areas for future research.
INTRODUCTION
One of the most essential goals of all companies is to satisfy its customers (Fornell 1992; Morgan, Anderson, and Mittal 2005; Oliver 1997). As a result, customer satisfaction research is often a firm's largest annual expenditure on market intelligence (Morgan et al. 2005; Wilson 2002). Customer satisfaction can be defined as an overall evaluation of performance based on all prior experiences with a firm (Anderson, Fornell, and Lehmann 1994; Fornell 1992) and has been linked to a firm's overall performance and health (e.g., Anderson et al. 1994; Anderson, Fornell, and Mazvancheryl 2004; Gruca and Rego 2005; Ittner and Larcker 1998).
A critical component of a company's successful usage of customer satisfaction information is the effective dissemination of this information (Maltz and Kohli 1996; Menon and Varadarajan 1992; Morgan et al. 2005). While the dissemination of customer satisfaction information has been empirically addressed, research to date has been limited to the dissemination of customer satisfaction information within the firm. For example, the results from a recent study indicate that 86 percent of firms disseminate satisfaction results upward to senior managers, 62 percent disseminate customer satisfaction results downward to frontline employees, and 68 percent disseminate customer satisfaction results horizontally to other departments (Morgan et al. 2005). Researchers in a variety of disciplines, however, have been calling for measures of customer satisfaction and other intangible assets to be disseminated to shareholders and other groups external to the firm (Eccles 1991; Fox 1996; Karlgaard 1997; Lev 2004). In fact, Lev (2004, p. 109) states "companies need to generate better information about their investments...