The measurement of customer perception about the quality of a product or service is an important element of conducting a business today. The purpose of the book, Measuring Customer Satisfaction: Survey Design, Use, and Statistical Analysis Methods is to provide some guidelines in the generation and use of customer satisfaction surveys. Both qualitative and quantitative aspects of surveys are presented in seven chapters and an overview of statistical concepts used in the book is given in appendices. The first edition was a bestseller since its release in 1992, and the second edition includes an update of the chapter on reliability and validity and new chapters on sampling methods and on real‐life examples of development and use of customer surveys. As in the first edition, the author says he wrote this book because he wanted to “present important scientific principles in simple, understandable terms.” In my view, the author has largely succeeded in this endeavor.
The contents of the book are as follows. First, the author discusses two methods for generation of survey questions: quality dimension development process and the critical incident technique. The quality dimension development process is a top‐down approach where dimensions of a product or service are first generated then specific examples in each dimension are developed and turned into question items. The critical incident technique is a bottom‐up approach which gathers examples of organizational performance by interviewing the customers. These critical incidents are grouped together into clusters which form the questions in the survey.
Guidelines for developing questionnaires include the characteristics of a good question, response format, and question item selection. The question items should be relevant, concise, and unambiguous. The author recommends a questionnaire with five response options allowing the customers to express the degree of their opinion. Judgmental and mathematical methods of selecting the question items are mentioned. In mathematical item selection, item‐total correlation, group differences, and factor analysis are discussed in deciding which items to retain.
In order to ensure that the results from the survey accurately reflect the customers’ attitudes, the author suggests evaluating a survey using measures such as reliability and validity. Reliability is the extent to which the measurements are free from random errors. Validity is the degree to which the survey measures what it is designed to measure. The formulas are provided for reliability indices such as split‐half reliability method and Cronbach’s alpha estimate.
As surveys are usually administered to a sample of customers rather than all of the customers, the author discusses various methods of sampling. He also shows how to interpret confidence intervals and how to determine the sample size to ensure desired confidence level and tolerable error. Also he includes suggestions to improve response rates.
The last two chapters are devoted to examples of customer satisfaction questionnaires. The concepts illustrated by examples in chapter 6 include summarizing data with descriptive statistics, determining the most important customer requirement, and using control charts to track progress over time. Chapter 7, new in the second edition, contains real‐life, detailed examples of how a company has used customer satisfaction questionnaires. The examples include surveys from dental insurance, newspaper, and coffee shop. The three surveys employ different methods of the questionnaire development, survey administration, and analysis of results. It illustrates how different survey processes can be, depending on the industry and the purpose of the survey. The statistical techniques illustrated by these examples include determining the sample size, confidence intervals, factor analysis, correlation analysis, regression analysis, ANOVA, and control charts.
I was happy to see that the author included appendices which give an overview of the statistical concepts that are used by the book. In fact, the appendices take up about one third of the book. They cover measurement scales, descriptive statistics, hypothesis testing, ANOVA, regression analysis, and factor analysis. The appendices are most helpful to a reader with some basic knowledge of statistics. I believe this book is a valuable resource for anyone who is involved in administration of surveys. In a relatively short book, all of the important qualitative and quantitative issues in survey questionnaires are covered. The writing style of this book is informal, and the technical concepts are presented in a concise but easily understandable manner.
A few minor complaints about this book arise from the fact that many topics were covered in such a short book. Because of the informal and concise style of the author, the writing sometimes sounds a little choppy. The new paragraphs tend to start abruptly. Also, the way that the author glosses over some topics might leave some readers confused. For example, a reader who is not familiar with factor analysis may be confused by the term “factor loading” which is not explained. When the author gives numerical examples of factor analysis, it is not explained how one uses factor loading to decide which items represent each factor. When the concept of power in hypothesis testing is introduced, one would expect the immediately following example to illustrate the power of a test. However, this example makes no mention of it. In addition, there are some mistakes in the book which might throw off a reader. For example, in the Appendix explaining regression analysis, the data and the scatter plot in the example do not match.
Nevertheless, the above are minor quibbles in a solid, thorough book on the subject. This book would be a good supplement for the part of a business course which covers customer surveys. Also, this book is a practical guide for anyone who is involved in developing and administering surveys. Some background in statistics would be helpful to understand all of the technical concepts. However, a reader who may not understand all the quantitative aspects in the book will still find plenty of helpful tips in the book.
