Reference and Memory in Customer Satisfaction Studies

Abstract

Revealed customer opinion is not necessarily static over time for a variety of reasons, many of which are functions of consumer memory and not directly related to objective levels of service provision. In the absence of empirical data, corporate folklore has developed several divergent views of the effect of customer memory and past experience on current satisfaction levels. Through a general statistical model of service quality evaluation and its change dynamics, objective mediation among these competing hypotheses is possible. This paper presents two longitudinal studies of divergent customer bases whose data modeling sheds light on several aspects of customer memory as it relates to service quality evaluation and modification.