How You Can Really Improve Your Customer Satisfaction Management. Implications from the Three Factor Theory of Customer Satisfaction

Empahsis on customer Satisfaction has been leading the marketing priorities for several decades. This has led to well established techniques bound to identify the key attributes into which firms should invest resources to enhance the overall satisfaction. Although much experience has been developed, these traditional and well accepted techniques fail to provide reliable measures of attribute importance. An increasing body of research has started addressing this issue suggesting that, behind the attribute importance, there may be different attitudes and responses of customers but the few attempts of employing this alternative perspective by practitioners are questionable. This paper first shows empirically and discusses the limitations of the traditional "key drivers" analysis as well as the inconsistencies of the recent analytic procedure employed by practitioners to identify the different types of attribute importance. It then provide a response to the need of developing reliable methods to assess the nature of satisfaction drivers that the managers can employ in their efforts to monitor their customer satisfaction on a continuous basis.