A driving factor is a company’s success is customer satisfaction in the products and services that it offers. The National Quality Research Center at the University of Michigan provides a rating system to allow companies to pinpoint what drives customer satisfaction. The NQRC does this by offering a service called the American Customer Satisfaction Index. However decisions based on this rating system can be beneficial only if companies know how to use the results of the consumer research it provides.

Have you ever wondered how companies decide to produce new innovative products or to improve current ones?  You could say that it is could be due to the lack of sales due to current outdated goods and services.  However, a driving factor that affects the decision is how satisfied the customer is with the product offered.  But how do companies pinpoint what factors drive customer satisfaction and how does this frame the decisions that company’s make?

The National Quality Research Center at the University of Michigan is one company that does just that.  Their mission is to provide a customer satisfaction rating system to allow companies to make important decisions concerning plans of areas of improvement. These areas of improvement can address customer satisfaction in regards to quality of products and services available to the immediate and potential customers of client companies.

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The most prevalent service the NQRC offers is the American Customer Satisfaction Index.  The ACSI provides a score by measuring the value of economic output as compared with the capacity of economic output. This allows companies to make important decisions regarding implementation of new and better products and services to their customer base. With years of experienced research, the NQRC has shown that customer dissatisfaction affect households desire to buy which has a large effect on lowering the United States GDP, or growth domestic product which is a determinant of economic growth which affects how the companies plan to produce better products and services or even eliminate failing products or service lines.

 

Unfortunately, customers have different needs to achieve satisfaction. One way framing can occur is depending on the question presented by the research conducted and the customer demographics.  What some customers view as dissatisfactory is not always what others see as dissatisfactory. Also, all customers may not be reached outside the survey geographic area which causes companies to make improvements in areas only addressed as dissatisfactory by its customers surveyed but does hone in on the particular thing that is causing it or by using results provided by customers outside the survey geographic area.  Sometimes minor improvement in existing products and service lines are needed without more costly approaches such as implementation of new products or services.

Another way is the fact that the manufactured goods always offer higher scores on the index then service goods.  Research conducted by the NQRC has shown that companies that offer a large variety of services as opposed to goods tend to have a lower score. This means that the more services that are offered the more potential of unsatisfied customers.  The framing this provides to companies is the misconception that because of a low score then a need for more services are needed which according to the past trends of ACSI results produces an even lower score during the next phase of research.

In addition, a failure of companies to include trends in other industries that supplement the distribution of its goods and services such as the petroleum industry can cause framed decisions to be made with potential failed outcomes.  This means including foreign industries that are addressed by the ACSI.  An example of this occurred recently concerning the auto industry and its foreign market competitors.  Surveys conducted by other consumer research companies did not include factors such as customer satisfaction concerning foreign-made automobiles.  Results from these other research companies provided a false hope that the American auto industry was doing well when according to the ACSI result the American automobile industry was losing to foreign competitors in regards to customer satisfaction.  This temporarily caused American automobile companies to frame decisions to postpone improvements in their current goods and services instead of concentrating on products and services offered by their foreign market competitors.  One idea that could be the cause of customer dissatisfaction in American-made automobiles is the recent increase in petroleum prices and less fuel-efficient cars.  This discrepancy provided by the ACSI obviously caused American automobile dealers to rethink current project planning with the recent increase in fuel-efficient automobile production in the United States.

Consumer research is a great way to find ways to gain a competitive edge in today’s markets.  However, it is the ability to properly use the results of the research to help reach decisions concerning project planning to improve current or possible products and services. Just as products and services reach a particular consumer market so does research conducted regarding the particular product and services.  Approaching the results by looking at the entire picture that the results represent will allow companies to reap the benefits of consumer research such as that provided by the ACSI.

 

For more information on the current market scores issued by the ASCI please visit:

http://www.theacsi.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12&Itemid=26