How Much Do Product And Service Quality Contribute To Customer And Employee Behavior

Satisfaction has always been a cornerstone of what we understand to be total quality in products and services, as perceived by the customer. Unfortunately, satisfaction, which measures the attitudinal response to the functional and tangible elements of value delivery (time, accuracy, completeness, suitability, price, functionality, etc.) has been proven to have very little impact on, or connection to, actual customer behavior.

Even total quality icon W. Edwards Deming believed that satisfaction was not an ineffective metric for understanding the effect of satisfaction of tangibility on customer actions. In his book, Out of the Crisis (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1982, p. 141), Deming said: “It will not suffice to have customers that are merely satisfied. An unhappy customer will switch. Unfortunately, a satisfied customer may also switch, on the theory that he could not lose much, and might gain. Profit in business comes from repeat customers, customers that boast about your product and service, and that bring friends with them. Fully allocated costs may well show that the profit in a transaction with a customer that comes back voluntarily may be 10 times the profit realized from a customer that responds to advertising and other persuasion.”