Customer Satisfaction Evaluation in Retail Businesses

Abstract

Customer satisfaction is the key building block for developing and managing customer relationships. In the ever-increasing competitive society, customer satisfaction has become the most important factor that determines the survival and development of enterprises. Based on customer satisfaction theory, this paper introduces the evaluation model which indicates customer satisfaction depends on the following four factors: customer expectation, previous consumption experiences, perceived product quality and perceived service quality. As far as the characteristics of retail businesses are concerned, three-tier evaluation index system is constructed. Customer satisfaction can be accordingly evaluated by analytic hierarchy process (AHP) with the variables included in the index system. With the aim of providing beneficial reference for retail enterprises on how to improve customer satisfaction, this paper specially make an empirical study on Wal-Mart in order to analyze and verify the causalities between customer satisfaction and each influencing factors.