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Introduction
There is an overwhelming amount of research analysing the influence of customer satisfaction on the financial performance of companies in different industries. Some papers confirm that customer satisfaction directly influences the financial results of a firm (Grigoroudis et al., 2013; Keisidou et al., 2013; Sun and Kim, 2013; Mittal and Frennea, 2010; Williams and Naumann, 2011) while other researchers argue that customer satisfaction has a mediating role contributing to financial performance (Saeidi et al., 2015; Lins et al., 2017).
The relationship between customer satisfaction and the financial performance of a firm is an issue of great interest to academicians and practitioners (Dossi and Patelli, 2010) for several reasons.
First, customer satisfaction is a key marketing indicator (since the shift from transactional marketing to relationship marketing occurred), as it expresses the relationship between clients and the firm (Heinonen, 2014). Companies spend significant resources on improving customer satisfaction, so they must arrive at quantitative ways of measuring its value. Second, if customer satisfaction does have a positive influence on financial performance, then it can be used as a predictive indicator and financial performance can thus be managed by managing customer satisfaction.
The linkage between customer satisfaction and financial performance is usually considered at the company level (Williams and Naumann, 2011; Mittal and Frennea, 2010). Some research confirms the positive impact of customer satisfaction at the industry level (Sun and Kim, 2013; Fornell et al., 2010). Moreover, there is a significant amount of research for the banking industry pointing out the importance of customer satisfaction analysis (Monferrer-Tirado et al., 2016; Paul et al., 2016). However, no research has yet to confirm the influence of customer satisfaction on the financial performance of the banking industry employing cross-country evidence. This gap can be explained by the nature of the data used in such research. The conventional and most popular measure of customer satisfaction is the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), which is collected for the USA alone.
We have a unique data set that describes customer satisfaction with a similar methodology to the ACSI, called the Extended Performance Satisfaction Index (EPSI; initially the methodology was called ECSI. The abbreviation EPSI has been fully established since 2001, when the company EPSI Rating, which...