Quality Planning and Assurance

3 Customer-centric Planning

3.1 Goal: Design for Customer

3.1.1 Customer-driven Development

Customer Satisfaction

Although there are different benchmarks for customer satisfaction, a typical one is meeting customer expectations. Thus, customer satisfaction can be viewed as a status, and measurement, of customer feelings about a product, services, or both. In addition to being an outcome measurement, customer satisfaction may be viewed as a perceptual, evaluative, and psychological process. This broad spectrum of customer satisfaction requires in-depth studies to fully understand.

Customer satisfaction is an overall consumer behavior, and thus affected by various influencing factors. A single measurement may or may not provide reliable and comprehensive information. In addition, the data of customer satisfaction often comes directly from a set of customers. Most times, these data are indirect, e.g. sales records, profits, market share, customer complaints, etc.

Customer satisfaction is about the customers themselves, who received a product or service, and their influence on other potential customers. Positive word-of-mouth can translate into new customers. However, dissatisfied customers engaged in greater word-of-mouth discourse about their experiences than satisfied customers (Anderson 1998). Many studies have focused on this subject recently.

Customer studies are often called customer-satisfaction studies. Their aim is to understand what customers think, need, and want, ...