Towards a Managerial Research Agenda for Customer Satisfaction

Abstract

Extant customer satisfaction research has typically focused on studying the processes through which consumers arrive at judgements of satisfaction with products and services, as well as on the measurement of satisfaction. Practicing managers, however, face a number of important questions about CS/D that have not received attention in the literature. It is argued in this paper that the CS/D research agenda should be extended to include these managerial issues. The employee-satisfaction-profit chain at Sears is used to illustrate the managerial research focus for CS/D research. A conceptual framework that positions customer satisfaction clearly within the theory of the firm is also presented.