Assessing And Managing The Costs Of Satisfaction In B2B Services

Customer satisfaction has been shown to be key in pursuing firm profitability, both in consumer and business markets. However, the relationship between customer satisfaction and the costs that a company incurs to obtain satisfaction has been less widely investigated. The present study seeks to fill in this gap, by identifying the levers controlling the relationship between value-for-customer and costs in B2B service industries. By exploring those characteristics of B2B services that make it difficult to correlate costs and income, the article proposes a model to link the service component to satisfaction, on the one hand, and to activity costs, on the other. The model is tested on a set of business customers of an advertising agency.