ABSTRACT
A customer's level of satisfaction is the summary of feelings and evaluations about needs and wants, hopes and fears. Some might argue that the real measures of satisfaction are financial, such as volume and margin changes. Low levels of customer satisfaction with the quality of US-built automobiles in the early 1980s resulted in loss of market share to Japanese makers even years later when the quality differences had effectively disappeared. One problem with purely financial measures is that they tend to lag behind, sometimes by years, changes in customer satisfaction that will probably influence buying decisions well into the future. The term “survey” is a general one, with many meanings. Whether seeking to measure either customer or employee perceptions, one key distinction is between diagnostic and normative types of surveys. While the two may sometimes look much alike, the purposes are basically different.
