Customer benefit

Customer satisfaction

"Customer satisfaction provides a leading indicator of consumer purchase intentions and loyalty." "Customer satisfaction data are among the most frequently collected indicators of market perceptions. Their principal use is twofold:"

On a five-point scale, "individuals who rate their satisfaction level as '5' are likely to become return customers and might even evangelize for the firm. (A second important metric related to satisfaction is willingness to recommend. This metric is defined as "The percentage of surveyed customers who indicate that they would recommend a brand to friends." When a customer is satisfied with a product, he or she might recommend it to friends, relatives and colleagues. This can be a powerful marketing advantage.) "Individuals who rate their satisfaction level as '1,' by contrast, are unlikely to return. Further, they can hurt the firm by making negative comments about it to prospective customers. Willingness to recommend is a key metric relating to customer satisfaction."

"In literature antecedents of satisfaction are studied from different aspects. The considerations extend from psychological to physical and from normative to positive aspects. However, in most of the cases the consideration is focused on two basic constructs as customers expectations prior to purchase or use of a product and his relative perception of the performance of that product after using it.

Expectations of a customer on a product tell us his anticipated performance for that product. As it is suggested in the literature, consumers may have various "types" of expectations when forming opinions about a product's anticipated performance. For example, four types of expectations are identified by Miller (1977): ideal, expected, minimum tolerable, and desirable. While, Day (1977) indicated among expectations, the ones that are about the costs, the product nature, the efforts in obtaining benefits and lastly expectations of social values. Perceived product performance is considered as an important construct due to its ability to allow making comparisons with the expectations.

It is considered that customers judge products on a limited set of norms and attributes. Olshavsky and Miller (1972) and Olson and Dover (1976) designed their researches as to manipulate actual product performance, and their aim was to find out how perceived performance ratings were influenced by expectations. These studies took out the discussions about explaining the differences between expectations and perceived performance."

In some research studies, scholars have been able to establish that customer satisfaction has a strong emotional (i.e., affective component). Still others show that the cognitive and affective components of customer satisfaction reciprocally influence each other over time to determine overall satisfaction.

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Wikipedia