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Gaining from Customer Satisfaction
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Director of Market Data & Content Services
We have all had some miserable customer service experiences and as we sit on hold or try to navigate through yet another voice response system, we wonder how can these companies get away with this. In fact, a 2006 Harris Interactive Poll showed 40% of us would rather go to the dentist than deal with poor customer service. My most recent mind numbing experience with my phone company, Verizon [VZ
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], made me wonder if there is money to made off of this. Here is what I found...
Customer experience is defined and measured differently. Forrester Research, Inc. (www.forrester.com) publishes a Customer Experience Index which is based on customers' 1-5 scale perception of usefulness, ease of use, and enjoyability of a product or service. Based on their research, retailers lead in customer experience with Costco [COST
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], Borders [BGP
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], Barnes & Noble [BKS
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] and Target [TGT
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] in the top four spots of their 2007 survey.
The University of Michigan's National Quality Research Center calculates the American Customer Satisfaction Index (www.theacsi.org). This number is based on an econometric model that takes into account the relationship between expectations, satisfaction, and resulting actions (see Figure below). Based on this model product companies rise to the top of the 2007 ACSI rankings with Heinz [HNZ
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], Clorox [CLX
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], Toyota [TM
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]and Hershey [HSY
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] taking 4 of the top five positions (retailer Amazon.com [AMZN
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] ranked second).
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Data is a real-time snapshot *Data is delayed at least 15 minutes
