Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is defined as a customer’s overall evaluation of the performance of an offering to date. This overall satisfaction has a strong positive effect on customer loyalty intentions across a wide range of product and service categories.

The satisfaction judgment is related to all the experiences made with a certain business concerning its given products, the sales process, and the after- sale service. Whether the customer is satisfied after purchase also depends on the offer’s performance in relation to the customer’s expectation. Customers form their expectation from past buying experience, friends’ and associates’ advice, and marketers’ and competitors’ information and promises. 

Factors which determine the extent of expectations are: customer needs, total customer value and total customer cost. It is mentioned by researchers who study customer choice that choosing a product or service is only one of the stages customers go through.

There is general agreement that: Satisfaction is a person’s feelings of pleasure or disappointment resulting from comparing a product’s perceived performance (or outcome) in relation to his or her expectations. Based on this review, customer satisfaction is defined as the result of a cognitive and effective evaluation, where some comparison standard is compared to the actually perceived performance. If the perceived performance is less than expected, customers will be dissatisfied. On the other hand, if the perceived performance exceeds expectations, customers will be satisfied. Otherwise, if the perceived expectations are met with performance, customers are in an indifferent or neutral stage.