Measuring Customers' Overall Satisfaction

Abstract

Recognizing the drawbacks associated with the traditional approach of measuring customers' overall satisfaction, which simply relies on a single-item measurement of overall satisfaction, an alternative approach is presented. The proposed approach utilizes: all product/service attributes, each customer's varying degree of satisfaction with the attributes, and the relative importance of each attribute obtained and analyzed from all customers who participated in the survey. Each customer's overall satisfaction is then determined by a weighted average of the gap between a customer's expectation of performance (importance rating) and actual experience (performance rating) for each attribute, and the relative importance of each attribute as perceived by the total customer group. A comparison between a single-item approach and multi-attributes approach along with an illustrated example is also presented using the customer satisfaction data from the airlineindustry.