Information Quality

7Customer surveys

7.1 Introduction

Customer satisfaction studies deal with customers, consumers, and user satisfaction from a product or service. The topic was initially developed in marketing theory and applications. The BusinessDictionary (www.businessdictionary.com) defines customer satisfaction as “the degree of satisfaction provided by the goods or services of a company as measured by the number of repeat customers.” According to this definition, customer satisfaction seems an objective and easily measured quantity. However, unlike variables such as type of product purchased or geographical location, customer satisfaction is not necessarily observed directly. Typically, in a social science context, analysis of such measures is performed indirectly by employing proxy variables. Unobserved variables are referred to as latent variables, while proxy variables are known as observed variables. In many cases, the latent variables are very complex and the choice of suitable proxy variables is not immediately obvious. For example, in order to assess customer satisfaction from an airline, it is necessary to identify attributes that characterize this type of service. A general framework for assessing airlines includes attributes such as on board service, timeliness, responsiveness of personnel, airplane seats, and other tangible service characteristics. In general, some attributes are objective, related to the service’s technical‐specific characteristics, and others are subjective, ...