A cross‐industry comparison of customer satisfaction

This paper seeks to identify service satisfaction measures that can be used across industries.

The paper attempts to identify empirically core characteristics of customer satisfaction ratings across six industries based on the ratings of 10,835 respondents within the USA. The industries included are banking and finance, retail, government, grocery stores, hospitality/sports, and restaurants.

The paper finds that banking and finance and hospitality/sports entertainment were rated highest by their patrons. Those dealing with government, general retail and moderately priced fast food restaurants received lower service satisfaction ratings. Differences were also found among respondent characteristics (i.e. age, gender, education and ethnicity/race).

The study sample was selected from organizations readily available to the research team. Future studies based on systematic random samples would enhance the generalizability of the findings.

The results provide a basis from which cross industry benchmarking and the identification of best practices can be captured and used by practitioners.