Considering Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction, a term often used in marketing, is a measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or beat customer expectation. Customer satisfaction is defined as "the number of customers, or percentage of total customers, whose reported experience with a firm, its products, or its services (ratings) exceeds specified satisfaction goals."
Quite often the difference between those that simply survive in business and those that thrive is keeping abreast of, and adjusting to, the ever changing attitudes and expectations of the market place. One such change has been the significant change in attitudes of customers over the last 10 years.   There was a time when customers were less critical and vocal if not totally satisfied when dealing with a business. This is not the case today. Today, customers are becoming increasingly more demanding, less tolerant and very critical when not having their expectations met.
If you don’t listen to your customer’s thoughts to learn their needs and desires, you fail to give them what they need as a product because you simply don’t know what that need is. Further to this, you reject them as a person. The greatest source of information you have to move your business forward is from your customers.
A survey is done to understand customer’s satisfaction through –
  * Face to face
  * Call them on phone
  * Mail them a questionnaire
  * Email them a satisfaction survey
The usual measures of customer satisfaction involve a survey with a set of statement using Likert Scale –
  1. Very dissatisfied
  2. somewhat satisfied
  3. neither satisfied nor dissatisfied
  4. somewhat satisfied
  5. very satisfied