Discovering relationships between service and customer satisfaction

Organizations spend significant resources tracking customer satisfaction and managing service delivery. Although a great deal of effort is expended in understanding what goes on within each of these areas, little or no effort has been applied to identifying and quantifying the relationships between the two. The objective of this research is to discover and establish potential relationships between service data and customer satisfaction. This understanding will enable more effective management, which will lead to improved quality, reduced cost and increased customer satisfaction. This study uses three years of data from an IBM operating system to measure the correlation between 15 service variables and nine customer satisfaction attributes. The results show that: (1) There is a relationship between the service data and customer satisfaction. This is the first time the existence of such a relationship has been proven and quantified. (2) The relative order of influence on customer satisfaction, of the four key service measures that are usually tracked, is defective fixes, followed by the number of problems, which in turn are followed by the number of defects and days-to-solution. The latter two were found to have little or no influence on customer satisfaction. (3) There is a return on investment of at least ten to one, for each dollar spent on quality improvement efforts in development