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Difficulties in conducting effective surveys to address customer satisfaction issues can be a significant problem in marketing practice. Addresses four of the most crucial methodological issues encountered with customer satisfaction surveys, namely sampling frames, quality of survey data and instruments, non‐response problems, and reporting of results and interpretation. Provides implications and guidelines.

While most practitioners are familiar with traditional customer satisfaction surveys, research findings suggest that best practice companies use multiple tools to bring the voice of the customer inside the organization. The purpose of this study is to examine how best practice companies use various tools to listen to customers. The primary contribution of this article is in discussing a variety of different customer listening tools used by practitioners, along with introducing new customer listening tools to the literature. Furthermore, this article puts forth a framework that captures essential characteristics of each tool, depicting when their use is most appropriate. Finally, this article depicts how customer listening tools are linked together and synthesized into a customer performance model.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that an internal customer service survey approach to assessment delivers many benefits to technical services and library systems units. Findings from such a survey provide the evidence needed to implement process improvements, conduct strategic planning and more. The survey used in this case study can be adapted by other libraries or library units to conduct assessment, gauge customer satisfaction and identify areas for process improvements.

The Technical Services and Library Systems Division of the University at Albany Libraries conducted an internal customer service survey to gauge customer satisfaction with its services.

Survey results demonstrated that customer surveys are a valuable assessment tool and can be used as an evidence-based approach to library management. Technical services and library systems units should use this tool to identify whether customers are satisfied with the services provided, whether the services are still needed, whether additional services are needed and more.

This paper provides an approach to conducting a customer service survey, an analysis of potential benefits and a survey instrument that others could adapt to use in their own libraries. The survey instrument can be used not only for assessment of technical services and library systems, but by other functional units in all types of libraries.

This paper and approach is original research; there are no other papers on this topic in the library and information science literature.

Outlines the development by Barclays Life of a tracking survey to collect information concerning customers’ feelings of satisfaction and loyalty. Describes research undertaken by Barclays Life into the determinants of satisfaction amongst customers and the importance of each of these elements in determining loyalty. Initial qualitative research was undertaken to allow the company to develop a frame of reference concerning the elements of service which customers considered important. These initial findings were used in later quantitative studies to establish the relative importance of the different elements, with a view to understanding what was determining customer loyalty. The research culminated in the development of a tracking survey instrument, now used by the company to monitor customer satisfaction and loyalty levels across time and customer groups. Discusses both the findings of the research undertaken, and the importance of such research for firms. Outlines the use to which the information gathered by the surveys is put, together with initiatives which have resulted from the research.

Discusses how Digital Customer Services highlights a survey on achieving good “scores”, helping everyone in the organisation to work towards customer satisfaction. Describes three facets of the survey. Stresses that information gained from the survey can be utilised. Focuses on the use of the expectation scale and asserts that a survey can focus on achieving good “scores” which can be used as a public relations tool or it can help all to work towards customer satisfaction. Concludes that the programme is ever‐changing and the organisation committed to adjusting survey techniques to suit the changing dynamics and needs of a growing customer base in a global market.

Customers from different cultures might have different expectations and perceptions of quality, leading to different levels of satisfaction. Together with the construct and measurement equivalence issues of cross-cultural surveys, this raises the question of the comparability of customer satisfaction measurements across countries. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the survey method of anchoring vignettes as a tool for improving the comparability of customer satisfaction measurements across countries and to shed some light on cultural influences on customer satisfaction measurements.

Based on the models of American Customer Satisfaction Index and European Performance Satisfaction Index, the authors designed and conducted a survey using the method of anchoring vignettes to measure and compare customer satisfaction with mobile phone services in four countries – Costa Rica, Poland, Sweden and Thailand. The survey was carried out with young adults aged 20–30 years, who were mostly university students.

This study demonstrates how anchoring vignettes can be used to mitigate cultural bias in customer satisfaction surveys and to improve both construct and measurement equivalence of the questionnaire. The results show that different conclusions on cross-cultural benchmarking of customer satisfaction would be drawn when using a traditional survey compared to the anchoring vignettes method.

This paper evaluates the survey method of anchoring vignettes as a potential quantitative research method for studying customer satisfaction across countries. The results also contribute to customer satisfaction research as these shed some light onto how culture influences customer satisfaction measurements. The practical implication for firms and managers is that allocating resources among different countries based on traditional customer satisfaction surveys may be misleading.

To address multiple problems facing a company's top management with respect to the customer satisfaction survey. Is the customer satisfaction survey still suitable after many years of use? What method should be applied to help ensure better utilization of information from the customer satisfaction survey? Should the three aspects (i.e. quality, delivery, and responsiveness) representing the customer satisfaction continue to be used as part of the survey's main contents. As an ISO 9001: 2000 certified company, the customer satisfaction survey is required.

A method was proposed to help integrate the survey results with other key performance indicators (or ratios). This integration represented the verification effort on the suitability of the customer satisfaction survey. The examinations into the interrelationships between these three aspects the company's performance indicators included three perspectives. They were: no time‐factor consideration; one‐period time‐lag factor; and two‐period time‐lag factor. The set of key performance indicators was selected jointly with the company's top management.

The findings indicated that the quality and responsiveness aspects were still suitable. This was because these results were closely related to the production volumes, number of customer complaints, number of customers, and, etc. Therefore, the revision of the customer satisfaction survey needed to focus on adding other aspects such as flexibility and courtesy while doing away with the delivery aspect.

The proposed method, and its findings and recommendations received positive responses from the company's top management. This method utilized and related existing performance information in an integrated manner.

This study generated a potential approach to understand and to help interpret the customer satisfaction survey's results, to boost the utilization of relevant performance information, and likely to assist in a target‐setting process during a planning session.

Bank and credit union customers were surveyed to determine bank and credit union service quality performance. The results of our study indicate that credit unions rate significantly higher than banks on 11 of the 14 service quality questions: access; courtesy; communication; credibility; security; empathy; tangibles; basic service; fairness; fixing mistakes; and guarantees. The findings also indicate that neither banks nor credit unions do a good job of surveying customer needs or retaining customers. Other results indicate that 50 percent of total respondents surveyed reported that they had stopped using a financial service provider because of poor service performance. The vast majority of that group reported that their decision was made because a bank failed to provide adequate service.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a methodology to use complaints, claims and company innovation as an internal data source of customer needs for product development using the quality function deployment (QFD)-Kano approach instead of an ordinary customer survey.

This paper confirms that the customer complaints and claims and company innovations from the internal data source are equivalent to the Kano model’s product attributes. Data were selected from the company’s documents. To investigate the data category, a Kano questionnaire was designed and tested with 100 random respondents. Based on their answers, categories for the quality characteristics were determined and compared with the initial data categories. A second survey using professional customer respondents was conducted to increase the results’ reliability.

The approach was shown to be effective in employing complaints, claims and innovations as an alternative source of customer needs in the QFD-Kano approach.

It is assumed that companies document their customer complaints and claims, as well as their strategic innovation plans. The complaint and claim data need to be extracted to reveal their quality characteristics. For future research, data extraction using text or data mining may be useful to bridge this gap.

The product development team may ascertain customer needs as duly classified. This voice of the customer is more accurate and requires less time.

The paper may be of value to researchers and practitioners involved in product design and development, since it offers a new source of customer need data obtained internally as an alternative to customer surveys.

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a survey that aimed to analyse the state of organisational and operative evolution of the functions and activities overseeing customer satisfaction in Italian banks.

The research was conducted by questionnaire, to which 92 banks responded, representative of 77 per cent of the total assets of the Italian banking system.

The analysis of the results makes it possible to highlight the current approaches aimed at managing customer satisfaction, as well as the extent of integration between this and other management processes within the banks surveyed. The authors found that in these banks customer satisfaction is no longer a staff activity but increasingly a line activity, it involves the responsibility of top management and is a key indicator in staff incentive schemes.

The research aims to contribute to the literature on customer satisfaction on the one hand, by verifying if and how banks measure and manage some of the customer satisfaction cause‐effect relationships investigated by studies on the subject and, on the other hand, by focusing attention on organisation and internal processes aimed to support the assessment and improvement of customer satisfaction.