An Introduction to Customer Satisfaction Theory and Measurement

What Is Satisfaction?
Satisfaction is an overall psychological state that reflects the evaluation of a relationship between the customer/consumer and a company-environment-product-service.  Satisfaction involves of the following three psychological elements: cognitive (thinking/evaluation), affective (emotional/feeling) and behavioral.

Overall Measures of Satisfaction
Satisfaction is a result of a product related experience and reflects the overall opinion of a consumer’s experience with the product’s performance.   It makes little sense to measure satisfaction on a product that has never been used. 

Satisfaction can influence post-purchase/post-experience actions (such as word of mouth effects and repeat purchase behavior) other than usage.  Additional post-experience actions might include search behavior, changes in shopping behavior and trial of associated products.

Satisfaction and attitude are closely related concepts. Attitudes and satisfaction may both been defined as an evaluation of a social object and the individuals relationship to it. The distinction is that satisfaction is a "post experience" evaluation of fitness or utility of the product to produce satisfaction.

Affective Measures of Customer Satisfaction
A consumer’s attitude (liking/disliking) towards a product can result from any product information or experience whether perceived or real.  It is meaningful to measure attitudes towards a product that a consumer has never used, but not satisfaction.

Cognitive Measures of Customer Satisfaction
A cognitive element is defined as an appraisal or conclusion that the product was useful (or not useful), fit the situation (or did not fit), exceeded the requirements of the problem/situation (or did not exceed).  Cognitive responses are specific to the situation for which the product was purchased and specific to the consumer’s intended use of the product, regardless if that use is correct or incorrect.

Behavioral Measures of Customer Satisfaction
Consumers often think of dissatisfaction as being synonymous with regret or disappointment while satisfaction may be linked to ideas such as, "it was a good choice" or "I am glad that I bought it."   When phrased in behavioral response terms, consumers indicate that “purchasing this product would be a good choice” or “I would be glad to purchase this product.”  Often, behavioral measures reflect the consumer’s experience with other individuals associated with the product (i.e. customer service) and the intention to repeat that experience.

Expectations and Customer Satisfaction
Expectations are beliefs (likelihood or probability) that a product/service (containing certain attributes, features or characteristics) will produce certain outcomes (benefits-values) given certain anticipated levels of performance based on previous affective, cognitive and behavioral experiences.  Expectations are often seen as related to satisfaction and can be measured as follows:

1) Importance-Value of the product/service fulfilling the expectation;

2) Overall Affect-Satisfaction Expectations:  The (liking/disliking) of the product/service;

3) Fulfillment of Expectations: the expected level of performance vs. the desired expectations.  This is “Predictive Fulfillment” and is a respondent specific index of the performance level necessary to satisfy;

4) Expected Value from Use:  Satisfaction is often determined by the frequency of use. If a product/service is not used as often as expected, the result may not be as satisfying as anticipated.  For example a Harley Davidson that sits in the garage, an unused year subscription to the local fitness center/gym or a little used season pass to Snowbird Ski Resort would produce more dissatisfaction with the decision to purchase than with the actual product/service.

Expectancy Value Measures of Purchase Intention (BI), Attitude (A) and Satisfaction (SAT)

Expectancy value models have been found to perform well in predicting both satisfaction/dissatisfaction and behavioral intention (intention to try, purchase, recommend, or re-purchase a product or service).

The Expectancy value theory model using attitudes and beliefs reads:

where:

w₁, w₂ = weights that indicate the relative influence of the overall attitude toward the object and the normative influence to purchase the product

∑a_i * b_i = the overall attitude toward the object. The overall attitude is formed by the multiplicative product of a_i (the person’s affective evaluation of attribute i), and b_i (here defined as the importance of attribute i in the purchase decision). The sum is taken over the k attributes that are defined as salient in the purchase decision.

∑nb_i * mc_i = The overall normative component of the decision process. This is computed as the multiplicative product of nb_i (the norms governing attitude i), and mc_i (the motivation of the respondent to comply with those norms).

Purchase Intention (BI)
Purchase intention is operationalized as Behavioral Intention and is measured using a question such as "Indicate the likelihood of you buying sometime during the next year" with a seven-point scale labeled "definitely will" and "definitely will not" at the endpoints.

Satisfaction
Overall satisfaction or dissatisfaction with an object is often measured using a five-point liking-disliking scale.  As an example, "in general, I like Crest toothpaste" and "In general, I dislike Crest toothpaste" at the endpoints.

The like-dislike measure is used as an overall measure of respondent satisfaction with a product or service (after purchase).  Satisfaction leads to favorable feelings and dissatisfaction leads to unfavorable feelings.

The evaluative dimension may be measured in terms of like-dislike, favorable-unfavorable; approve-disapprove; good-bad; and delight-failure scales.

Attitude (a_i*b_i)
b_i - the probability that attribute i is associated with performing behavior B. The concept "Crest toothpaste prevents decay” could be rated on a seven point scale with endpoints labeled "Very Likely" and "Very Unlikely".

a_i - the evaluation of belief i. A representative measure of a_i would be "In terms of buying Crest toothpaste, decay prevention is ..." with a five or seven point scale with "good" and "bad"; or “Excellent” and “Poor” at the endpoints.

Measuring Expectations
In building a customer satisfaction survey, it is also helpful to consider reasons why pre-purchase expectations or post-purchase satisfaction may or may not be fulfilled or even measurable. 

1) Expectations may not reflect unanticipated service attributes;

2) Expectations may have been quite vague, creating wide latitudes of acceptability in performance and expected satisfaction;

3) Expectation and product performance evaluations may be sensory and not cognitive, as in taste, style or image;

4) The product use may attract so little attention as to produce no conscious affect or cognition (evaluation), and result in meaningless satisfaction or dissatisfaction measures;

5) There may have been unanticipated benefits or consequences of purchasing or using the product (such as a use or feature not anticipated with purchase);

6) The original expectations may have been unrealistically high or low;

7) The product purchaser, influencer and user may have been different individuals, each having different expectations.