Measuring and Analyzing Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is the ultimate validation of quality. Product quality and customer satisfaction together form the total meaning of quality. Indeed, what differentiates total quality management (TQM) from the sole focus on product quality in traditional quality engineering is that TQM is aimed at long- term business success by linking quality with customer satisfaction. In this modern-day quality era, enhancing customer satisfaction is the bottom line of business success. With ever-increasing market competition, customer focus is the only way to retain the customer base and to expand market share. Studies show that it is five times more costly to recruit a new customer than it is to keep an old customer, and that dissatisfied customers tell 7 to 20 people about their experiences, while satisfied customers tell only 3 to 5.

As a result of TQM, more and more companies are conducting surveys to measure their customers' satisfaction. In this chapter we discuss customer satisfaction surveys and the analysis of survey data. As an example, we describe an analysis of the relationship between overall customer satisfaction and satisfaction with specific attributes for a software product. In the last section we discuss the question of how good is good enough.