Measurement and Management Issues in Customer Satisfaction Research: Review, Critique and Research Agenda: Part One

Abstract

Customer satisfaction research has become the most frequent application of market research in the 1990s. There are however a number of issues imposing difficulties on its measurement and manage ment. This two-part article provides a synthesis of various conceptual and practical issues that exist in the customer satisfaction assessment literature in order to identify where we stand today and create a sense of direction for future research. The issues to be discussed include: (1) What is customer satisfaction ? (2) Are customer satisfaction and service quality concepts distinguishable? (3) How one can and ought to measure customer satisfac tion? (4) Who determines satisfaction: the researcher or the customer? (5) Are customers' expectations for and assessment of hospitality and tourism services culture-driven? And finally (6) is measuring customer satisfaction an end in itself?

Key Words:

• Customer satisfaction
• service quality
• measurement
• Ex-pectancy-Disconfirmation Paradigm
• comparative standards