Basic Methodological Approaches

Abstract

In the context of quantitative techniques and tools (e.g. data analysis methods and statistical models), the problem of customer satisfaction evaluation presents the following basic characteristics (Wilkie and Pessemier, 1973; Churchill, 1991; Cooper, 1994) This particular subject is approached not only as a measurement problem, but also as a problem of understanding and analyzing customer satisfaction. In simple words, it is not enough for a business organization to know if its customers are satisfied or not, but it is necessary for the applied methods and techniques to identify the reasons behind customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction. In the majority of practical applications, it is commonly accepted that the data of the problem are based on the customers’ judgments and should be directly collected from them. This justifies the necessity of conducting customer satisfaction surveys that results in the collection of a large volume of data. This is a multivariate evaluation problem given that customer’s global satisfaction depends on a set of variables representing product/service characteristic dimensions. In addition, in several cases, it is necessary to examine and analyze customer behavior in relation to a set of competitive products.