Preface
All over the world, organizations are focusing on retaining existing customers while targeting potential customers. Measuring customer satisfaction provides critical information on how an organization is providing products or services to the marketplace. In order to measure customer satisfaction, survey questionnaires are used, in which respondents are asked to express their degree of satisfaction with regard to multiple aspects of the product or service. Statistical analysis of data from these surveys is carried out and measures of various aspects and overall satisfaction are computed. This data is, however, non-trivial to handle because of the subjective nature of the observed variables.
First of all, as described by Ferrari and Manzi (Quality Technology and Quantitative Management, Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 117–133, 2010), the relevance correct weighing of the variables that determine the level of satisfaction are unknown. In addition, these variables often have an ordinal measurement scale which needs to be suitably dealt with. Moreover, the level of satisfaction is generally dependent on both expectations and individual characteristics of respondents as well as on contextual variables. Surveys also contain measurement errors caused by the subjective nature of the variables and by cognitive dissonance that can affect data, with undesired consequences on the reliability of the results. With the objective of handling, or at least to controlling, some of these problems, many ...
