Ï Ingrid Fecikova Â
The author Ï Ingrid Fecikova is a Lecturer at the Technical University of  Koice, Slovakia. s Keywords Customer satisfaction, Measurement, Customer retention, Customer loyalty, Profit Abstract Customer satisfaction (CS) has become an important issue for commercial and public service organisations. Companies win or lose based on what percentage of their customers they can keep. Success is largely about retention of customers, which again depends on CS level. It would be a great help to be able to comprehensively measure the quality of product and service, by relating the measures of quality to real customer behaviour. Some companies get feedback about CS through the percentage of complaints, some through non-systematic surveys, again some do not measure CS at all, because ``the system would not add anything useful and is very time-consuming ' '. Give three managers in the same company the same objective: to improve CS, however it may be measured, and they will come up with three distinctly different and incompatible plans. CS requires a number of ingredients, all of which need to be considered. Aims to develop and simplify measurement systems by using a general formula that makes quantitative measurement of CS possible. Considers four important aspects that have a negative or positive influence on profitability related to CS. Electronic access The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/0954-478X.htm
The TQM Magazine Volume 16 . Number 1 . 2004 . pp. 57-66 # Emerald Group Publishing Limited . ISSN 0954-478X DOI 10.1108/09544780410511498
Introduction
In an atmosphere of heavy competition it is dangerous to be a non-customer oriented company. Most markets are very competitive, and to survive, organisations need
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