Observations on Applied CS/D Research

Abstract

As a result of participating directly in the efforts of several firms that were developing customer satisfaction tracking systems and participating in three national benchmarking studies the author observed the following and more. What matters most from an overall management perspective is overcoming inertia and instituting a satisfaction measurement system rather than perfecting its measurement methods. Comparison standards and psychological process models of CS/D have little relevance for applied efforts to increase organizational customer satisfaction. Actually bringing about customer satisfaction improvement is much harder than it looks. Achieving increased satisfaction is difficult and slow because it cannot occur without a company-wide obsession for improvement. And, preventing problems is more important than fixing them well.