The Customer Satisfaction Feedback Loop for Local Telephone Service

Abstract

Longitudinal customer satisfaction surveys are often performed in service industries to make a temporal evaluation of perceived service delivery, and to suggest ways in which the service could be improved from the customer's viewpoint The experimental implementation of the suggested changes, followed by resurveying of the affected customers, forms a customer-service provider feedback loop which has the potential to foster continuous service improvements. In this paper, we discuss this loop, and will, in the process, describe recent cross sectional models for customer satisfaction with local telephone service, and evaluate their efficacy in guiding an extensive field experiment whose main goal was to raise those satisfaction levels. In analyzing the experimental results, recent results from the CS/D literature will be used and extended to contrast the static and dynamic modeling of customer satisfaction. The results of this analysis have consequences both for the completion of the feedback loop, that is, for the improvement of service and the changing of customer attitudes, as well as for the structure and content of the survey process which produced the results.