A Content Analysis of Customer Satisfaction in Annual Reports

Abstract

Despite research investigating the dissemination of customer satisfaction information within the firm and calls for companies to communicate customer satisfaction information to its stakeholders, the dissemination of customer satisfaction information to external publics has not been investigated. This research addresses this issue by investigating the occurrence of customer satisfaction measurement results in the letter to shareholders section of the corporate annual report using a sample of both product and service industries. The results indicate that quantitative customer satisfaction results are rarely included in the letter to shareholders and many letters fail to even mention customer satisfaction. The results and implications of this research are discussed as well as areas for future research.