Attitudes towards Customer Satisfaction Measurement in the Retail Sector

Abstract

Reports a research study to assess corporate attitudes to customer service measurement (CSM), following criticism of CSM in the literature. Findings are based on a survey among marketing managers in 86 large UK retail and retail service organisations. Results include: 1) CSM is generally agreed to be inadequate on its own, so is often supplemented with mystery shopping and staff surveys; 2) most managers do not agree with the published criticisms of CSM, although some are dissatisfied with their CSM programmes. In particular, more needs to be done in provision of feedback to dissatisfied customers and benchmarking customer satisfaction against competitors.