8. External communication.
The influence of messages sent out by service providers plays an important role on customer expectations. Customers will expect the service to be in
keeping with the messages.
F. Measuring Customer Satisfaction
After discussing about customer satisfaction, the next question arise is, how to measure the customer satisfaction? Kotler 2008, p.41 discuss several ways to
measure customers’ satisfaction: 1.
Complaint and Suggestion System The organization makes it easy for its customers to deliver suggestions and
complaints. The media is suggestion boxes, comment cards or toll free telephone.
2. Customer Satisfaction Survey
Responsive companies obtain a direct measure of customer satisfaction by conducting periodic surveys. They send questionnaires or make telephone
calls to random sample of their recent customers or make telephone calls to a random sample of their customer to find out their feel about various
aspects of the company’s performance. Customer Satisfaction Survey is divided into 4 categories:
a. Directly Reported Satisfaction
The respondents are being asked directly with questions in order to know if they are very satisfied, satisfied, enough, dissatisfied, or very
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dissatisfied. This survey is used to collect the customer opinion and needs which can give the result called the customer satisfaction index.
This customer satisfaction index is the standard that the company needs to maintain.
b. Derived Dissatisfaction
The questions that being asked included in two aspects, how high is the customer expectation in the certain attribute, and how high is
performance that customer’s feel of this attribute. c.
Problem Analysis Respondents are being asked to describe two things; the problems
which related with the company offers and the suggestion for improvement.
d. Importance-Performance Analysis
The respondent is asked to rate the services according to the customer importance and company performance in each attributes.
3. Ghost shopping
This method is to hire person to pose as potential buyers to report their finding on strong and weak points they experienced in buying the
company’s and competitors’ products 4.
Lost Customer Analysis Companies contact customers who have stopped buying or who have
switched to another suppliers to learn why this happened. Much of this interest has centered on the controversy generated by their service quality gaps model
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Parasuraman 1985 in Kottler 2008, and particularly the SERVQUAL instrument developed to measure service quality Parasuraman et al., 1988 in
Chowdhary Prakash 2007.
G. Customer Satisfaction Measurement Advantages
