Customer Satisfaction and the Prediction of Behavior in a Hypothetical Context

Abstract

From a company perspective, customer satisfaction and the subjective judgment of general quality are most useful when viewed as part of a chain of customer evaluations ranging from attribute perceptions up to loyalty and future behavior predictions. While they are of paramount interest to the manager, the latter items are notoriously difficult to measure well, so that their intrinsic meaning is unclear and their linkages to more familiar constructs are tenuous. These problems are vastly inflated when the behavior of interest is necessarily hypothetical. This paper describes several measures of intention in a hypothetical context, exhibits ways to ensure and check their validity, and discusses their relationship to lower-level judgments.