Chapter Overview

At the end of this chapter we hope you think and feel differently about customer satisfaction. Satisfaction involves an interplay between emotional and cognitive appraisals. Satisfaction judgments can be made with respect to any or all of the aspects or stages of product and service experience. Satisfaction often reflects a complex array of both positive and negative emotions. Fulfillment, or the feeling of being satisfied, implies goals or standards that form a basis for comparison. Accounts of satisfaction are nested within the life world of the customer, and different customers are likely to make different satisfaction judgments about the same absolute level of performance. Individual judgments of satisfaction express a broader system of cultural values, meanings, beliefs, emotions, group relationships and conflicts. Attributes, features and dimensions that contribute to heightened levels of satisfaction may sometimes differ from attributes that contribute to heightened levels of dissatisfaction.

Assessing the causes of satisfaction can be very complex. Many managers believe that performance or quality paves the road to satisfaction. Research suggests that customers and managers don't necessarily agree about product and service quality. This research suggests the importance of finding out how customers perceive quality. Across industries and even cultural contexts research confirms that perceived quality is an within and between consumer segments and cultures in performance dimensions. The most basic goal is to measure quality in a way that reflects customer-defined dimensions and standards, but is actionable for management.

Something that has often been stressed in corporate slogans and mission statements is that a vital key to customer satisfaction is employee satisfaction. Happy employees help make happy customers. To have happy employees who make happy customers, managers need to acknowledge that the customer is NOT always right. Employees need appropriate coping and problem solving skills to handle difficult customers, situations and their own personal feelings.

Choice features may be used in forming satisfaction judgments, but in other cases they may not even be similar or may have radically different influences over choice than over satisfaction. There are a lot of reasons why choice criteria may differ from satisfaction drivers. Sometimes the consumer can't foresee the problems or benefits of a product before purchase. In other cases important influences on satisfaction are unpredictable or undifferentiated between competitive offerings. If a company can truly distinguish themselves from competitors on goal outcomes then there may be a closer alignment between choice criteria and satisfaction drivers.

A considerable amount of research has suggested that expectations are central to the satisfaction response. Expectations include predictions of future performance, but also such things as goals, hope and wishes, apprehensions, unknowables, uncertainties and probabilities. When expectations are very abstract or ill-formed modeling satisfaction as a function of expectations may not be very useful. Many internal and external factors influence expectations, including memories of past experiences, word-of-mouth communications, product cues, and organization promises. Many expectations derive from our cultural milieu. Very little research actually focuses on how cultural values and myths become significant factors in satisfaction. The relationship between expectations and satisfaction is very complex. Consumers have vague or unknown expectations, multiple levels of expectations and changing expectations. More research is needed to understand the dynamic interplay between consumption experiences and expectations. When we look at the consumption experience over time we realize that satisfaction with products and services shifts as current concerns, salient life projects and life themes of consumers shift.

Most satisfaction research has employed the expectancy-disconfirmation model of satisfaction as a way of understanding the relationship between comparative standards and satisfaction. This model suggests that expectation and disconfirmation operate in tandem to jointly determine satisfaction levels. One important strategic implication of this model is that meeting performance expectations is probably not the key to satisfaction. For example, delivering as expected when expectations are low is hardly going to result in a happy, loyal customer. Marketers must move beyond expectations to fill the needs, wants and desires of the consumer.

One model of satisfaction stresses consumers' desires as the comparative standard. Desires are the levels of products' attributes and benefits that a consumer believes will lead to , or are connected with, higher-level values. Much more research is needed on the desires approach to understanding satisfaction.

Fairness can also be an important comparative mechanism used in judging consumer satisfaction. What consumers view as fair can be quite complicated. We outlined three dimensions of fairness (procedural, interactional, distributional) that could influence consumers' levels of satisfaction/dissatisfaction. Not all consumers are equally equity sensitive, and fairness as a comparative standard may be more likely to be evoked in particular situations or exchanges.

Regret can also function as a comparative standard in judging satisfaction. Regret is a negative reaction to the belief that another decision would have been better. Many characteristics of the situation and the individual influence feelings of regret. Regret can influence satisfaction levels by creating as the comparison standard "what might have been" if the consumer had made a different choice. Marketers can attempt to mitigate against "fear of regret" by offering guarantees and warranties, but can do little to prevent the regret that is a byproduct of improbable events, others' outcomes, and the consumer's imagination.

When a product or service fails, the consumer often attempts to understand the reason why. The degree of disappointment and anger felt and also intentions to repurchase and intentions to complain are influenced by the explanations consumers construct for why the product or service failed. Research suggests that the impact of attributions on satisfaction will depend on whether the consumer holds the company responsible, whether the outcome is important to the consumer, and whether the consumer perceives the outcome as reflected on the general performance of the company.

Until recently, most consumer satisfaction research viewed satisfaction as simply a cognitive judgment with little or no emotional content. Recent research however shows that satisfaction is a mix of emotion and cognition that can simultaneously include a variety of positive and negative emotions. Consumers do not necessarily have the same thing in mind when they claim they are satisfied. We described five different response modes that might all be described as satisfaction including: satisfaction as contentment, satisfaction as pleasure, satisfaction as delight, satisfaction as relief and satisfaction as ambivalence.

In response to satisfying and/or dissatisfying purchase and consumption experiences consumers may exercise one or more of four behavioral options. When a consumer has a dissatisfying purchase and consumption experience perhaps the single most common response is simply not to purchase of use that product or service again. In particular, when consumers perceive that they have choices, and don't have to patronize a particular organization, they will switch when they are dissatisfied. The consumer will exit the exchange relationship.

Consumers may also respond by speaking up--voice. Voice can take several different forms including the complements an organization may receive when it delivers an especially satisfying outcome, complaints to the company about performance failure, negative and positive word-of-mouth with other consumers or consuming organizations or third party complaints or complements. Voice is highly consequential for marketers. By encouraging consumers to complain and seek redress management can actually create more satisfied customers who are more likely to talk favorably about the organization with other consumers. Consumers' interpersonal communications strongly impact other consumers' purchases. In particular, negative word of mouth tends to be highly persuasive and vivid. There are a number of complex and varied reasons why consumers don't complain. Some of the reasons are cultural, others structural, others economic and still others psychological.

As a consequence of either a satisfying or dissatisfying experience the consumer may continue to patronize the firm. We defined customer loyalty as a deeply held commitment to rebuy or re-patronize a preferred product or service consistently in the future. One of the important long-term consequences of at least some types of customer satisfaction is loyalty. Loyal consumers are very resistant to competitive and situational pressures to switch and can have a very favorable impact on the profitability of the firm.

Consumers may also express themselves through actions other than switching, voice or loyalty. We used to the term twist to incorporate both positive and negative novel behaviors that consumers undertake in response to satisfaction/dissatisfaction. All of these behaviors (both positive and negative) suggest that the consumer is restructuring meanings, roles and objects in the marketplace in a way not intended by the marketer. Much more research is needed on this aspect of consumer behavior.

Quality, satisfaction and loyalty all have direct effects on the profitability of the firm. Although each firm and each industry in each country may find different levels and types of relationships among these variables the general idea that higher perceived quality, higher levels of customer satisfaction, and more loyal consumers payoff has been widely supported by many different research efforts.

We ended our discussion of consumer satisfaction by exploring the relationship between adaptation and satisfaction. The fact that people adapt may serve both to make people less satisfied with pleasurable stimuli and more satisfied with aversive stimuli. Adaptation has diverse ramifications for subjective well-being. For marketers a couple important implications of adaptation is that consumers may have spiraling expectations and that consumers may come to accept or even depend on conditions that are not "objectively" good for them. We also briefly discussed a number of other implications of adaptation theory for marketers.