CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
What is customer satisfaction?
Customer satisfaction is a measurement of customer attitudes about products, services and brands. While it's always been smart to keep customers happy, the term "customer satisfaction" became popularized in the 1980's with the total quality movement. Customer satisfaction involves determining the degree to which a company’s products or services meet the requirements of the end user. Companies that are certified ISO 9001:2000 must now demonstrate how they measure customer satisfaction, and how they are improving in this area. Firms planning to become ISO certified will need to begin developing these capabilities. Increasing competition (whether for-profit or nonprofit) is forcing businesses to pay much more attention to satisfying customers. Customer satisfaction is an ambiguous and abstract concept and the actual manifestation of the state of satisfaction will vary from person to person and product/service to product/service. The state of satisfaction depends on a number of both psychological and physical variables which correlate with satisfaction behaviors such as return and recommend rate. The level of satisfaction can also vary depending on other options the customer may have and other products against which the customer can compare the organization's products.
Satisfaction is basically a psychological state, care should be taken in the effort of quantitative measurement, although a large quanti ...