An approach to setting up a national customer satisfaction index: the Jordan case study

Abstract

The aim of this paper was to develop a national customer satisfaction index (CSI) in Jordan and to derive its theory using generalized maximum entropy. During the course of this research, we conducted two different surveys to complete the framework of this CSI. The first one is a pilot study conducted based on a CSI basket in order to select the main factors that comprise the Jordanian customer satisfaction index (JCSI). Based on two different analyses, namely nonlinear principal component analysis and factor analysis, the explained variances in the first and second dimensions were 50.32 and 16.99% respectively. Also, Cronbach coefficients α in the first and second dimensions were 0.923 and 0.521, respectively. The results of this survey suggests the inclusion of loyalty, complaint, expectation, image and service quality as the main CS factors of our proposed model. The second study is a practical implementation conducted on the Vocational Training Corporation in order to evaluate the proposed JCSI. The results indicated that the suggested components of the proposed model are significant and form a good fitted model. We used the comparative fit index and the normed fit index as goodness-of-fit measures to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed model. Both measures indicated that the proposed model is a promising one.

Keywords:

• Customer Satisfaction Index
• SERVQUAL
• nonlinear principal component analysis
• generalized maximum entropy
• structural equations models

Acknowledgements

We thank the editor of JAS and the referees for their insightful comments and suggestions which greatly improve the presentation of the paper.