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  You could say that it is could be due to the lack of sales due to current outdated goods and services.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.