Business Excellence Models such as the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and the European Excellence Model give quite a prominence to measures of customer satisfaction and customer service effectiveness. Customer satisfaction has also become an important issue for public service and charitable organizations.
Hill and Alexander work for The Leadership Factor Ltd, based in Huddersfield, UK, and formed in 1996. The company specializes in customer satisfaction measurement. They are both practitioners and have over 50 years' experience between them.
The book comprises 16 chapters and five appendices which are well supported with 82 exhibits. It effectively explains how to conduct professional customer satisfaction and loyalty surveys, which can provide valid and reliable information for decision making.
As the authors emphasize in the introduction, which forms Chapter 1, this book “covers the whole process of customer satisfaction measurement, from designing a survey to drawing conclusions and determining action after the survey. However, It is not a book on how to implement that action” (page 2).
The aims of each chapter are set out at the outset in “bulleted” statements and conclusions are provided at the end of the chapter. Diagrams to illustrate the concepts, and tables and graphs to support the explanations, are included in every chapter.
Authors point out, in Chapter 2, that one of the prime causes of customer turnover for businesses is customer dissatisfaction, which leads to a loss of between 10 and 30 per cent of their customers per year. A customer's dissatisfaction is attributed to the differences in customers' expectations and experience of the service provided, and can be classified into five gaps: the promotional gap; the understanding gap; the procedural gap; the behavioral gap; and the perception gap. Though the descriptions are based on the SERVQUAL concept there is no reference to the works of Parasuraman et al. A brief consideration of this concept and its critiques are given in Appendix 2, along with an illustration of the SERVQUAL questionnaire. The clarity of this section would have improved with the inclusion of the model illustrating the five gaps.
Customer loyalty, which has become the spearhead of strategy to retain customers, is the topic of Chapter 3. The authors have clarified five different types of loyalty (monopoly loyalty; cost of change loyalty; incentivised loyalty; historical loyalty and committed loyalty) in explaining that customer retention and customer loyalty are not the same thing. They also emphasize that organizations, to succeed, have to win and maintain customer commitment. This they can try to achieve by becoming loyal to customers through total “devotion, duty, and allegiance” to meeting their requirements.
In the next three chapters, they respectively focus on:
- 1.
examining the satisfaction‐profit chain concept;
- 2.
aspects of defining customers' value package, their priorities and their tolerance band; and
- 3.
explaining the differences between the buying behavior of consumers, and organizational buyers that may involve more than one decision maker from various functions.
Conduct exploratory research is the topic of Chapter 7, in which they emphasize that it is arrogant, and almost always mistaken, to assume that the organization knows enough about what matters most to customers. They explain how to explore customers' hidden attitudes and perceptions by undertaking depth interviews using focus groups and projective techniques.
Chapters 8 and 9 focus respectively on the importance and methods (random and non‐random) of sampling and the advantages and disadvantages of different methods of surveying (personal interviews, telephone interviews, and self‐completion questionnaires).
In Chapters 10 and 11, they deal respectively with designing questionnaires and conducting personal and telephone interviews. Chapter 10 was the longest chapter (43 pages) in the second edition and it has been shortened (to 26 pages) by moving the model questionnaires to Appendix 1. The comprehensive examples of customer surveys given in Appendix, in the previous edition, have been removed in this edition.
Chapter 12 deals with manual and computerized analysis of data gathered, methods of presenting information (for example, frequency distributions, performance profiles, and customer satisfaction indices), for both internal and external consumption, and determining priorities for improvement, comparisons with competitors, etc.
In Chapter 13 and 14, the authors deal respectively with introducing the survey to customers and to staff within an organization, and explore the concept of customer loyalty and customer segmentation. In Chapter 13, the importance of feeding back the survey results is also explained. In Chapter 14, they suggest strategies for customer retention and customer attraction based on customer segmentation.
The last two chapters focus respectively on how relationships in the customer satisfaction chain can be measured, analyzed and modeled, and how to maximize the benefits of customer surveys. A summary of the reasons for the growth in customer satisfaction measurement and the benefits of measuring customer satisfaction and loyalty are also outlined.
A glossary of terms forms Appendix 3, which is useful for clarifying some of the technical terms that are not common knowledge. Also included, as Appendix 4, are addresses of suppliers of software, database providers, and focus group studios.
The content of the book would have improved, had the authors included the concept of dissatisfiers, satisfiers, and exciters popularized by Kano et al. (1984), which has gained increasing recognition in the field of both marketing and operations management.
