A Literature Review and Critique on Customer Satisfaction

A Literature Review and Critique on Customer Satisfaction
LIU Huiqun1, ZHAO Xin2 1. School of Economics, Tianjin University of Commerce, Tianjin, China, 300134 2. Department of Economics and Management, Dezhou Vocational and Technological College, Dezhou, China, 253000 [e-mail] Abstract: The concept of customer satisfaction has attracted much attention in recent years. Organizations that try to analyze this concept should begin with an understanding of various customer satisfaction models. In this paper, the emphasis is on reviewing the main concepts and models of customer satisfaction. Keywords: Customer satisfaction, Definition, Macro-models, Micro-models

1 Introduction
Both public and private sectors have given much attention to the concept customer satisfaction in the past couple of decades. Naturally, administrators have requested their staff to do customer satisfaction studies for their own organizations. An analyst or researcher must operationalize the concept of customer satisfaction in order to measure it. More importantly, in order to have validity for any measurements, the analyst needs to assume some model of the subject matter. The analyst must use very explicit conceptualizations of the subject matter (in other words, models) if she/he expects to do research and analysis that has relevance for organizational decisions. This paper is divided into several sections. First, a brief review of main concepts of customer satisfaction is provided. Next, we try to provide the analyst an overview of models of customer satisfaction. Finally, the article concludes with main research findings.

2 Consumer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction has been a popular topic in marketing practice and academic research since Cardozo 's (1965) initial study of customer effort, expectations and satisfaction. Despite many attempts to measure and explain customer satisfaction, there still does not appear to be a consensus regarding its definition (Giese and

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