Customer satisfaction – inseparable part of business’s productivity and success Essay

A significant level of customer satisfaction is among the most critical indicators of the business's future. Customers who are satisfied are also loyal and this ensures a consistent cash-flow for the business in the future. In addition, satisfied customers are often characterized as less-price sensitive and they are more partial to spend more on the products they have tried and tested before. Moreover, stability in business relations is also beneficial where the positive quality image minimizes the cost for a current customer (Matzler et al, 1996).
According to Hom (2000), satisfaction refers to a feeling or a short term attitude that can change owing to various circumstances. It exists in the user's mind and is unlike observable behaviours like product choice, complaint or repurchase. In a related study, John and Linda (1976), investigated the relationship between expectations, performance and satisfaction. The findings revealed that when a customer judges the performance of a product, he usually compares a set of perfor-mance outcomes that are expectations. The product is then likely to be considered as dissatis-factory or satisfactory.
In another related study, Johnson et al (1995) developed and tested alternative models of market-level expectations, perceived product performance, and customer satisfaction. They revealed that in a particular period, satisfaction is positively impacted by performance and expectations where performance effects reveal the impact that experiences of the product or service have upon satisfaction and expectation effects reveal the impact that past performance information has upon satisfaction. They stated that managers inclined to maximize market satisfaction for the purpose of enhancing future profitability is better off investing in long-run quality improvement strategies and methods as short-term techniques only leads to temporary performance or benefits per customer and will be negligible in the long-run. Similarly, Anderson et al (1994) examined the antecedents and outcome of firms' customer satisfaction and found that quality falling short of expectations has higher impact on satisfaction and retention compared to those exceeding expectations. They also revealed that satisfaction positively affects repurchase intentions and both positive and negative disconfirmations increase with the ease of quality evaluation.
Reliability
Reliability is the ability to perform the promised service consistently, dependably and accurately. Moreover, reliability also has been identified as a means of achieving total quality (Hensley & Utley, 2011). This dimension is critical as all cus-tomers want to deal with firms that keep their promises and this kind of situation is generally being communicated to the firm's customers (Har, 2008). Reliability has often been highlighted as the most important dimension in assessing the quality of service and is therefore a funda-mental requirement for business to compete in the marketplace (Cook et al., 2002). Empirical evidence suggests that service recovery which is one of reliability is a very effective way of en-hancing service quality because although the huge majority of customers will not express their dissatisfaction with a service encounter, the majority of customers who encounter problems will remain loyal to the service company if their problem is resolved. (Hart et al., 1990 Fitzsimmons & Fitzsimmons, 2001).