CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

Satisfaction can be broadly characterized as a postpurchase evaluation of product quality given prepurchase expectations. Based on Anderson and Sullivan review (1993) customer satisfaction and the main antecedents identified by consumer research: expectations, perceived quality, and disconfirmation.

Satisfaction was found to increase with both perceived quality and disconfirmation. This is an important finding given the strong focus of satisfaction research on expectations and disconfirmation as the antecedents of satisfaction. In addition, sat¬isfaction was found to have a positive impact on repurchase intentions. Moreover, both positive and negative disconfirmation were found to increase with the ease of evaluating quality. Hence, it may be more important to manage customer satisfaction when cus¬tomers are very familiar with a product or the product is not complex.

Firms which consistently provide high-quality products should have a more satisfied customer base and one that is more likely to be retained. An important component of managing satisfaction is the ability to control the impact of negative disconfirmation through com¬plaint handling and effective customer service. Since negative disconfirmation hurts the firm more than positive disconfirmation helps it, firms should take measures to maintain reliability when improving quality. It would be helpful to understand the conditions under which firms should allocate resources to maintaining quality before improving quality. The firm's future profitability depends on satisfying customers in the present. If consistently providing high satisfaction leads to higher repurchase intentions, then the expected number of times a buyer will repurchase should rise accordingly.

Customer Satisfaction is being an achievement of a company as it is an important task to satisfy the customers, considering that company’s sales come from two basic groups which are new customers and retained customers. Customer satisfaction can be identified as a result of the post purchase stage in a chain of buying process. While in post purchase evaluation, consumers take further action after purchase based on their satisfaction and dissatisfaction. The satisfaction of the customer refers to the relationship between the customer’s expectations and the product’s perceived performance (Kotler and Armstrong, 1999).

Satisfaction or dissatisfaction commonly emerges after the cognitive dissonance that mostly resulted in the term of evaluating what has been bought by the customers, while the customers make sure that they have done a worth buying decision otherwise they would have a buyer’s remorse condition.

“However, there is another type of unprofitable customer. This is the customer who is unprofitable in the current period and also in the future, perhaps because customers are becoming more demanding, have higher expectations, more knowledge, more buying power, and are more sophisticated in their buying behavior.” (McDonald et al., 1994)

Theoretically, satisfaction ratings should be linked to repurchase behavior. Yet this link may be difficult to observe in a commercial satisfaction survey if satisfaction ratings vary because of differences in customer characteristics. Consumers with different characteristics have different thresholds and consequently different repurchase probabilities. So, at the same level of rated satisfaction, repurchase rates are systematically different among different customer groups. Empirical research linking satisfaction to repurchase behavior has been lacking, especially for durable goods.

Customer satisfaction is a key issue for every company wishing to increase customer loyalty and thereby create a better business performance. The customer satisfaction has a positive effect on customer loyalty. This may be a coincidence but it could also indicate that a given loyalty could be obtained in many different ways. One way is to increase customer satisfaction by branding and similar activities, another is to be price effcient.