High service quality leads to high customer satisfaction and vice versa, but individual customer standards and perceptions can affect this relationship. Companies collect customer satisfaction data to improve service quality and increase customer loyalty. Customer satisfaction predicts future business intentions.
Perhaps the simplest way to consider the connection between customer satisfaction and service quality is to think in terms of how one affects the other. Generally, high service quality results in high customer satisfaction and vice versa. Still, there are variables to this equation, such as the different standards of reference each individual customer has and how those references affect their perceptions of service quality. Companies often collect customer satisfaction data to determine how service quality ranks against customers. After all, effective customer satisfaction strategies can lead to customer loyalty and increased business.
Some experts believe that the connection between customer satisfaction and service quality lies in service quality itself. In other words, providing a high quality of service results in high customer satisfaction. Likewise, providing a low quality of service results in low customer satisfaction.
Certain variables can affect the relationship between customer satisfaction and service quality. Perhaps the variable with the greatest impact is the customers’ perception of service quality. Different people have different frame of reference. What one customer might consider an instance of high quality of service, another customer might see as an instance of low quality of service. Therefore, a company may provide what it believes to be a high quality of service only to find that its customers are not satisfied.
Given these variables in the connection between customer satisfaction and service quality, many companies collect information to analyze customer satisfaction. This data can help companies take steps to increase customer satisfaction. Companies collect satisfaction data in a variety of ways. This can include methods from simple one-time surveys to longer surveys given to the same customers at different times. After the company collects the data, it analyzes it and starts making the necessary changes or adjustments to the quality of service.
Despite the various benchmarks and perceptions of quality, there is one factor that remains unchanged in the relationship between customer satisfaction and service quality. This factor is the reality that the level of customer satisfaction can predict customer loyalty. Customers determine their future intentions with a business based in part on the level of customer satisfaction they experience. If a customer experiences what he perceives to be poor service quality, it can be assumed that he will also experience low satisfaction and may not do business with that company in the future. Likewise, a customer who experiences the kind of service quality he recognizes as high is likely to do business with the company again and perhaps even become a loyal customer.
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