How to Measure Customer Satisfaction (2nd Edition)

Citation

Narasimhan, K. (2006), "How to Measure Customer Satisfaction (2nd Edition)", Measuring Business Excellence, Vol. 10 No. 1, pp. 80-80. https://doi.org/10.1108/13683040610652230

Customer satisfaction and customer service effectiveness form important performance measures in business excellence models such as the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and the European Excellence Model. The above book from Gower Publishing is a valuable contribution to this field.

Hill and Brierley work for Leadership Factors Ltd., a company that specializes in customer satisfaction measurement. They are respectively the founding Director and Principal Consultant. MacDougall is the Managing Director of the Leadership Factor Pty Ltd. All three have operated at senior management levels.

The book comprises 14 chapters and is well supported with 58 figures and five appendices (three questionnaires, details of benchmarking services offered by Leadership Factors Ltd, and useful web links).

In the first two chapters the readers are introduced to the subject and how to set objectives and plan the projects. The next six chapters deal with the methodology of conducting surveys to decide on the right questions to ask, the right people to target by using various sampling methods to accurately reflect the customer base, designing the questionnaire, rating scales to use, and the methods of administering the questionnaires to maximize response rates. How to inform the customers about a survey, what to tell them and how to obtain feedback are very briefly covered in chapter 9.

In chapter 10, the topic of analyzing the results of a survey is considered in some depth. Using fictitious data and charts to illustrate outcomes, the authors explain how to analyze data collected by using different rating scales; how to calculate a customer satisfaction index; and how to conduct a gap analysis to highlight priorities for improvement. The following chapter focuses on how to improve performance by benchmarking. The importance of conducting a “mirror” survey of employees is explained in chapter 12 (three pages). In chapter 13, the importance of giving feedback to both employees and customers is first explained and then the method to be adopted is briefly dealt with. The final chapter outlines the link between customer satisfaction and business performance.

This book is a highly practical guide in this field, as it provides step‐by‐step instructions for designing and implementing customer satisfaction measurement (CSM). It also highlights commonly made mistakes and clearly explains how to avoid them.