Use of customer satisfaction measurements to drive improvements

Journal article, 2020

Trends like servitisation and globalisation have increased the importance of intangible assets, and, accordingly, a need for non-financial performance measurements, the most frequently used being ‘customer satisfaction’. A key argument is that high levels of customer satisfaction have a positive effect on organisations financial performance. Still, many organisations fail to use these measurements as drivers for quality improvements. How customer satisfaction measurements are used in organisations varies between knowledge-enhancing, action-oriented, and symbolic. This paper studies how customer satisfaction information usage processes differ between organisations utilising the measurements in an action-oriented manner to support improvements, and organisations using them in a knowledge-enhancing or symbolic manner. Based on empirical data from 24 service organisations, the paper concludes that all organisations would benefit from more activities related to the strategy phase of customer satisfaction information usage, that is, activities that outline for what purpose and how these measurements are to be used. Moreover, to use customer satisfaction measurements to drive improvements requires a combination of strategic, long-term thinking, and concrete operationalisation of the measurements; merely working in a knowledge-enhancing manner with a lack of action orientation might end up only a symbolic use of customer satisfaction measurements.