"Customer satisfaction"
Customer satisfaction is the prime objective of marketing management and human beings strive hard to achieve customer satisfaction. This is very important for a business organization and they try to provide best value for their customers to retain customers with the company. Businesses are increasingly investing in improving their product and service quality to maximize customer satisfaction. Business organizations give their utmost priority for customer satisfaction due to this fact due to these business objectives (Kristensen, Martensen, & Gronholdt, 1999). The focus towards the level of service quality was increased due to this scenario. When every business try to improve their service quality targeting their customers, the concept service quality became a very popular subject area and many scholars started working on this subject. In Sri Lanka, not only private sector but also public sector also started improving their level of service. For instance, police, hospitals and other governmental authorities also started giving some trainings over their customer service staff.
Once we look into the concept customer satisfaction, it is a fundamental concept comes under human psychology. In business, traders found that the satisfied customers are coming back to their businesses again and again. Peter Drucker also mentioned that the purpose of every business is to create customers and marketing is viewing the business organization from the customer’s point of view. All these suggests the importance of customers and their satisfaction.
Later businesses became very competitive and every manager searched ways in excelling their business systems and processes in order to sustain or grow their business in the competitive market place. But what they forgot was they all are competing our the same customer base and if one play grow, other player loose equally, or else customer loose in terms of his high expenses over unnecessary consumption.
Scholars found two types of customer satisfaction approaches; Transaction specific customer satisfaction Cumulative customer satisfaction Transaction specific, is when each individual transaction is looked at on its own, with no regard for the level of service that has been experienced in the past. This could possibly be for transactions that are not used very often or are one off purchases.
Cumulative customer satisfaction, this type of satisfaction is the one that this research is most concerned with. The idea that a previous interaction will affect the expectation the following time. To this extent it could possibly be argued that there is a link from customer loyalty to expectations. Therefore, cumulative customer satisfaction is an overall evaluation based on the total purchase and consumption experience with a good or service overtime (Gorst, 2000).
Customer satisfaction Van be varied over the period of time. Here we need to figure out whether customer satisfaction is lasting for over many years or it is just over within few days or weeks. Business firms trying their level best to satisfy their customers by using many different marketing tools. Even marketing was initially defined as “customer satisfaction at a profit”. Marketing mix components and building market oriented businesses, and all other strategies have focused on delivering highest value to their customers and targeting more customer satisfaction. But the problem is, there is no clear answer whether customer satisfaction is cumulative or not. Because human mind-set general tendency is, its mental state is not permanent, it gets changed continuously. If this is true, programmes targeting on creating customer satisfaction become unnecessary expenditure. We do not have locally conducted researches in this regard. Currently Department of Marketing Management, University of Kelaniya is conducting a retail customer survey on cumulative customer satisfaction and results will be highly benefited for the marketers’ future direction.
REFERENCES
Gorst, J. K. (2000). Modelling customer satisafaction in service industries. Sheffield Hallam University.
Kristensen, K., Martensen, A., & Gronholdt, L. (1999). Measuring the impact of buying behaviour on customer satisfaction. Total Quality Management, 10(4-5), 602-614.