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Abstract
While most practitioners are familiar with traditional customer satisfaction surveys, research findings suggest that best practice companies use multiple tools to bring the voice of the customer inside the organization. The purpose of this study is to examine how best practice companies use various tools to listen to customers. The primary contribution of this article is in discussing a variety of different customer listening tools used by practitioners, along with introducing new customer listening tools to the literature. Furthermore, this article puts forth a framework that captures essential characteristics of each tool, depicting when their use is most appropriate. Finally, this article depicts how customer listening tools are linked together and synthesized into a customer performance model.
Introduction
For decades, the marketing literature has discussed the importance of customer value and satisfaction, placing these concepts at the core of a market orientation (Kohli and Jaworski 1990). Recognized as a key component to various business strategies, world-class companies now measure and manage customer value and satisfaction. In these strategies, customer value and satisfaction is often a key performance measurement, a leading indicator of financial performance, an important diagnostic measure for continuous improvement, and a tool to manage competitive advantage (Woodruff 1997). As a result, customer value and satisfaction research is the most prevalent type of research conducted by companies today (Oliver 1997).
Woodruff and Gardial (1996) suggest that a systematic, ongoing program which gathers customer value and satisfaction data is critical to managing a sustainable competitive advantage. Berry (1995) notes that practitioners should use a variety of tools that help the organization listen to customers' needs, preferences, and perceptions of a firm's performance. While academic researchers suggest that multiple tools should be used to listen to customers (Narver and Slater 1990), little empirical research has explored this area and many questions remain (Mentzer, Bienstock, and Kahn 1995). For example, how do leading-edge companies collect customer value and satisfaction data? Specifically, what research tools are used to listen to customers? How are these listening tools linked together over different time periods and synthesized to systematically understand customers? Currently, these questions have not been explored in the literature, leaving practitioners without a framework to guide their decisions.
The purpose of this study is to...