The Satisfied Customere?
Dr. Kaushik Mukerjee Faculty, ICFAI Business School, Pune

The word ‘satisfaction’ has Latin roots and literally translated into English means ‘to have enough’. A customer is satisfied when she feels ‘YES! I’ve had enough!’ But what happens in the customer’s mind that enables them to make a judgment about an offering? How does a customer decide on satisfaction?
Whenever a customer goes to buy a product/service, she goes with certain expectations. Any standard marketing textbook will tell you that the key to customer satisfaction lies in meeting these expectations. But where most standard books fall short is in giving an explanation of how these expectations are formed and the process that goes on in the customer’s mind in judging customer satisfaction. Strange though it may sound, a customer makes a judgment on customer satisfaction even when going to have a trivial snack like a masala dosa.
Expectations are created in the customer’s mind from a variety of causes and reasons:
Past experience: Let’s take the case of going to have a masala dosa at an udupi restaurant. Even when you go to a new joint, you go with certain expectations based on your past experience of having a masala dosa. These are with regard to the taste, the size, the ambience, the service, the seating, accompaniments (chutney and sambar) etc. etc. You make a decision based on how this experience compares with your past experiences of having a masala dosa.
Promotional claims: Expectations are created in the customer’s mind because of the promotional claims made by the company through advertisements and other promotions. So when Domino’s Pizza claims to deliver your pizza in 30 minutes, then even when they take 33 you’ll get annoyed, though other pizza delivery services may deliver in 45 minutes and you wouldn’t mind it.
Word of mouth: A very potent way of selling is through word of mouth. Your friend Ramesh goes to an udupi joint and finds the ‘green’ chutney that accompanies the dosa very tasty and tells you about this yummy experience. So when you make a trip to this joint to enjoy the ‘green’ chutney you certainly expect it to be served up with the dosa failing which you do not find it a relishing experience. So through word of mouth, people form expectations with regard to a product/service.
Third party information: People form expectations based on the information received from a third party (usually the media). Thus, when you read a film critic’s review in the newspaper, you form an expectation with regard to the film he is reviewing. This explains why producers of various goods and services like to hold press conferences in which they showcase their offerings and butter up the journalists so that they write favourable reviews.
The point to note here is that expectations are not only with regard to the core offering. For example, if you are going to a restaurant, the core offering is food. The essential reason why you are going to the restaurant is to eat food. But if you do a proper analysis, there are a number of other factors that you take into account before deciding your satisfaction level after a visit to the restaurant.
Consider this:
Evidently, you judge the experience at a restaurant based not just on the food but on a number of other aspects as shown in the above illustration. If the dosa you had at the udupi joint tasted better than the ones you had previously tasted, chances are that you were delighted with the experience. But coupled with the great taste maybe you had to shoo away an army of flies converging on your plate and you found the whole experience just tolerable (despite the great taste). And if in addition to the flies a surly waiter’s insolent attitude put your blood on boil, you sure found the whole experience intolerable (again despite the great taste).
When it comes to customer satisfaction, a customer is willing to tolerate an irritant up to a certain point and still remain satisfied. This is referred to as the Zone of Tolerance.
So a customer treats the buy as a package with all the ingredients thrown in – basic utility, service, after-sales service, ease of purchase, and conformation with promotional claims….every expectation associated with the offering that’s on her mind. And the customer decides on delight after considering the package as a whole with due credence to her priorities. She compares the package she receives against her own expectations and if they have been exceeded she sure lets out squeals of delight. But if customer satisfaction is all about understanding expectations and fulfilling them, then the problem isn’t of the most abstruse kind. Unfortunately it doesn’t conform to such uni-dimensional terms. For example, take the case of a train journey by Deccan Queen from Pune to Mumbai. An old lady traveling by this train has the expectations that she has a comfortable journey even if the train arrives an hour late. On the other hand, a sales executive, who has an 11:00 AM meeting in Mumbai, desperately wants the train to reach on time even if he has to go standing. Likewise, a family undertaking the journey may want comfortable seating with plenty of refreshments being served once in a while to pacify their hungry children. Thus, for the same offering, the expectations of different customers can be diverse. This necessitates the segmentation of customers by marketers and then catering to the expectations of the particular segment.
A number of MNCs are fine-tuning their offerings to satisfy Indian customers. The Nokia model 1100 has been made-for-India. Work began two years ago in Copenhagen and strived to address the problems faced by mobile users in India: dust was a major irritant so the 1100 has been made dust resistant. The keypad was created as a single unit with a mini flashlight attached. Likewise, Electrolux Kelvinator is developing a refrigerator that will keep the ice frozen even after a six hour power failure.
How do companies check customer satisfaction? Here are 5 real-life cases.

CASE 1
Let’s refer to the J.D. Power Asia Pacific 2004 India Original Tyre Customer Satisfaction Study. The study, in its fourth year, examines customer satisfaction with original tyres at 12 to 18 months of ownership. More than 1,500 owners of 28 different vehicle models participated in the 2004 study, which was fielded from June to August 2003. A new model of customer satisfaction measurement was deployed for 2004. Overall tyre performance is assessed on 20 attributes, grouped into five pre-defined factors: ride, handling, traction, durability and appearance. Unlike past years, the study now deals only with radial tyres, as nearly all the new passenger vehicles sold in India are now fitted with radial tyres.

CASE 2
TRAI conducted a customer satisfaction survey for ISPs providing internet service. The survey spanned entire India with various numbers of respondents representing the various ISPs. No. of respondents from each ISPs.
CASE 3
The Mobile Users Satisfaction Survey 2003 was done by International Data Corp (IDC) Voice & Data magazine. IDC India, a unit of world leader IDC, conducts its own survey, while TRAI has commissioned IMRB for its own surveys. For billing of mobile services, according to TRAI, billing errors should be 0.1 per cent (per 100 subscribers) per month. But 9 per cent of the sample size (2,217 users) has billing problems with the service provider. Beside Reliance, the maximum billing complaints in the top five were for HFCL (19 per cent), Tata Teleservices (13 per cent), Idea Cellular (10 per cent), and Aircel (9 per cent). The complaints for Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd
(BSNL), Bharti and Hutch are 7 per cent, 6 per cent and 5 per cent respectively. In the overall satisfaction category, where the TRAI benchmark is 95 per cent satisfaction, BPL with 79.8 per cent has topped the GSM category with Idea ranked second (78.9 per cent) and Hutch third (78.7 per cent). For Bharti and BSNL, the figures are 76.6 and 71.8 per cent respectively. In the WLL/CDMA category, Reliance Infocomm has been ranked No. 3 among the six players in overall satisfaction. Topping the list is Tata Teleservices with 75.3 per cent, followed by BSNL with 72.2 per cent. This provides a pertinent pointer with regard to the quality of satisfaction being enjoyed by mobile service subscribers in India and proves that they have a long way to go to achieve total customer satisfaction.

CASE 4
Dell the PC maker’s support satisfaction rating, as measured by Technology Business Research’s Corporate IT Service and Support Customer Satisfaction Study, fell slightly from the fourth quarter of 2003 to the first quarter of 2004.
The slip helped Dell rival Hewlett-Packard take the satisfaction lead among the three major PC makers for the first time since TBR began the quarterly study in 2000. Dell, which had led or been tied for the lead in satisfaction among the PC makers since the study’s inception, fell back to a tie for second place.
While HP moved into the top position among the PC makers, with a score of 81.85 out of a possible 100 points, Dell garnered an 80.32, and IBM scored an 80.94. Dell and IBM were considered to be in a statistical tie for second place, according to the survey, as TBR requires a distance of at least 1 percent between vendors in order to rank them separately.
TBR’s study surveys, on a quarterly basis, hundreds of corporate IT buyers on eight aspects of service support. TBR takes into account factors such as phone support, replacement parts availability, warranty upgrade price and overall satisfaction, and assigns each one a weighted score for a total of 100 possible points.

CASE 5
In association with Dataquest Magazine, IDC India conducted a survey among 400 CIOs in 2004 to develop a brand score of customer satisfaction for different product and service categories and to identify functional and service attributes that drive customer satisfaction. The survey covered large enterprises across various verticals. It was spread across six cities — Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkata. The survey covered desktops, laptops, servers and enterprise applications (SCM, CRM, ERP), and IT services (integrated and outsourced services). In each category, a sample size for each brand was identified. IDC India also weighted the results with brand-share among the sample surveyed to remove anomalies. For every category, parameters were developed separately, using the understanding of the market and from the study done last year. Some of the parameters and sub-parameters were changed accordingly as compared to last year’s survey. CIO’s were asked to rate the level of satisfaction on each of the parameters and sub-parameters on a five-point scale, depending on the usage of the product. IDC India derived the scores of importance from the satisfaction score, which was used as a weight for each of the sub-parameters. To arrive at the overall satisfaction scores, IDC India measured satisfaction against each of these “importance” parameters and arrived at a weighted score of satisfaction, on a maximum possible total of 100, which makes all the parameters and brands comparable within their scope. With increasingly promiscuous customer behaviour, it will be a great challenge for marketers to ensure customer retention; and beyond doubt, customer satisfaction will have a large role to play in the ensuing battle for the market.

References
www.jdpower.com
www.dqindia.com
www.trai.gov.in
www.cellular.co.za
www.zdnet.com
Businessworld (issue dated 24 May 2004) Article titled ‘India Customised’

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