AN EMPIRICAL STUDY ON THE QUALITY AND

CONTEXT-SPECIFIC APPLICABILITY OF COMMONLY USED

CUSTOMER SATISFACTION MEASURES

Meng Chung Lee and Jochen Wirtz

18 May 2000

Meng Chung Lee is a Research Executive with Research International Asia Pte. Ltd.

Jochen Wirtz is Associate Professor with the Department of Marketing, The NUS Business School, National University of Singapore, 17 Law Link, Singapore 117591. Tel: +65-8743656; Fax: +65-779 5941; E-mail: fbawirtz@nus.edu.sg, http//www.nus.edu.sg

AN EMPIRICAL STUDY ON THE QUALITY AND

CONTEXT-SPECIFIC APPLICABILITY OF COMMONLY USED

CUSTOMER SATISFACTION MEASURES

ABSTRACT

Many different measures have been used in customer satisfaction research, but few

studies have examined their quality and context-specific applicability. 

The first objective of this paper is to investigate this issue by assessing the affective and cognitive content of commonly applied satisfaction scales.

This study addressed this issue by examining whether satisfaction with hedonic benefits would be better captured by measures with affective content, while satisfaction with mostly utilitarian benefits would be better captured by measures with cognitive content. Furthermore, nine commonly used satisfaction measures were tested for their cognitive and/or affective content. In contrast to what was hypothesized, all measures were shown to capture both factors, although with slightly differing amounts.

The study also investigated whether the selection of satisfaction measures should be a function of product benefits. Results disproved this notion. Rather, measures which were shown to be of good quality (i.e. have good reliability and show low error variances) were equally applicable for measuring satisfaction, independent of whether the product benefits were hedonic or utilitarian.

INTRODUCTION

In today’s increasingly competitive world of business, satisfying one’s customers has become an essential ingredient for success. Customer satisfaction is an antecedent of customer repurchase intention, customer loyalty and retention, and ultimately the profitability of a firm (Bearden and Teel 1983; Fornell 1992; LaBarbera and Mazursky 1983; Oliver 1980; 1997; Oliver and Swan 1989). Therefore, it is essential for firms to effectively manage customer satisfaction. To be able do this, accurate measurement of satisfaction is needed (Wirtz 2000).

Satisfaction has often been measured using scales anchored in emotive words such as 'pleased', 'delighted' and 'happy'. These measures are generally regarded as affective in content in accordance with the nature of the scale anchors (Hausknecht 1990). However, does this imply that these measures actually capture more of affective rather than cognitive postpurchase evaluation? This has been suggested in the past (Hausknecht 1990), but has yet to be empirically tested. Similarly, if the scale anchors comprise of evaluative statements, do these measures actually provide a yardstick towards cognitive post-purchase evaluation?

Although a myriad of satisfaction measures has been developed, to date, there has been no empirical research on differentiating the use of these measures. Measures that have been shown to have high validity and reliability in one or several contexts, have been implicitly assumed to be equally applicable in other contexts.

It seems possible however, that the selection of satisfaction measures should be dependent on at least three factors: (1) purpose of measurement, (2) product characteristics, and (3) respondent characteristics (Lee and Wirtz, 1997). Stauss and Hentschel (1992) demonstrated empirically that the critical incident technique is superior to attribute-specific satisfaction measures in identifying potential areas for service improvement. The finding demonstrates that one type of measure is superior to another depending on the research objective. Our paper investigates the second issue of whether the selection of appropriate satisfaction measures should be a function of product characteristics. We advanced that the content of measures should be matched to the product benefits. Specifically, it is suggested that affective satisfaction measures would better capture satisfaction with products that have mostly hedonic benefits, while cognitive measures would be better for products with mostly utilitarian benefits. This notion is empirically tested in this paper.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Customer Satisfaction

Various models of satisfaction have been proposed and most of these models are based on cognitive comparison processes, where consumers evaluate their consumption experiences by comparing perceived performance with some standard. The disconfirmation- ofexpectations model, which uses expectation as the comparison standard, is the most widely applied model (e.g., Churchill and Surprenant 1982; Oliver 1997; Swan and Trawick 1981; Tse and Wilton 1988; Westbrook 1980), and performs well in competitive markets with reasonably knowledgeable customers who are able to match their needs and wants with what they expect from the chosen product (Wirtz and Mattila 2000). Expectation is a customer’s frame of reference, which is determined by his/her experience with a product, the observed experience of other consumers, word-of-mouth and advertising effects. In the disconfirmation-of- expectations model, consumers are hypothesised to bring expectations into an exchange encounter and then compare these expectations with perceived performance, resulting in a disconfirmation judgement (Yi 1990). Since this comparison process requires deliberate processing of information, the role of cognition is an important driver of satisfaction in the disconfirmation-of-expectations model (Jayanti 1995).

Although many of the previous conceptualisations of customer satisfaction have been based on cognitive evaluation, the role of affect has increasingly attracted attention in recent years (e.g., Mano and Oliver 1993; Oliver 1997; Westbrook 1987). It has been argued that the traditional cognitive disconfirmation-of-expectations models are inadequate in modelling satisfaction, especially in the context of services (Dube -Rioux 1990; Jayanti 1995; Liljander and Strandvik 1996). Services are experiential in nature, and therefore affect becomes an important determinant of satisfaction (Wirtz and Bateson 1999). In fact, one of the early studies on value, that is, a trade-off between sacrifice and quality, has already incorporated cognitive and affective aspects into a model of value (Hartman 1967; Hartman 1973). Developing on the model by Hartman, Ruyter et. al (1997) viewed satisfaction as the synthesis of cognitive and affective reaction to the value of a service.

Product Benefits

Consumption experience refers to the subjective consciousness of consumers as they interact with goods and services (Oliver and Westbrook 1993). It includes consciously experienced cognitive phenomena such as thoughts, beliefs and goals, and also the perception of sensory, emotive, imaginal and aesthetic responses to the ownership and usage of products (Hirschman and Holbrook 1982). As research on consumption experiences grows, evidence suggests that consumers purchase goods and services for a combination of two types of benefits: hedonic and utilitarian.

Hedonic Benefits Hedonic benefits of a product are obtained by customers through the intrinsically pleasing properties of a product, such as the pleasure provided by listening to a musical recording. Hedonic benefits are associated with the sensory and experiential attributes of the product (Batra and Athola 1990). Therefore, consumers usually purchase products with mostly hedonic benefits for the sake of pleasure and enjoyment. Mano and Oliver (1993) showed that the evaluation of hedonic benefits is mostly affective. Similarly, Dube-Rioux (1990) advanced that affect would become a key driver of satisfaction with products where the experiential aspect of consumption is important. Given that consumers buy certain products primarily for hedonic benefits and affect during consumption of such products is likely to be the key driver of satisfaction, it seems logical that satisfaction measures high in affective context should perform better than measures low in affective content. Taken together, these studies suggest that for products with mostly hedonic benefits, satisfaction measures high in affective content capture satisfaction better than measures low in affective content. This notion is examined in this paper.

Utilitarian Benefits. Utilitarian benefits of a product are associated with the more instrumental and functional attributes of the product (Batra and Athola 1990). An example would be the ability of an air-conditioner to cool a room. When consumers evaluate their satisfaction with the utilitarian benefits of a product, consumers primarily evaluate whether a product fulfils their instrumental or functional expectations. Mano and Oliver (1993) showed empirically that the evaluation of the utilitarian benefits of a product is predominantly cognitive. Therefore, it seems intuitive that for products with mostly utilitarian benefits, satisfaction measures high in cognitive content capture satisfaction better than measures low in cognitive content. Again, this notion is examined here.

METHODOLOGY

A survey method and a self-administered questionnaire were used, allowing for the testing of 'real life' satisfaction in different research contexts. A pilot test with sixty subjects and across ten different products was conducted using Batra and Athola's (1990) hedonic and utilitarian measures. Two products were identified that provide either mostly hedonic or mostly utilitarian benefits. They were ice-cream restaurant services for hedonic benefits, and ATM services for utilitarian benefits. Both products were selected as research context for this study.

A convenience sample of 260 university students from a local university was surveyed. 3 questionnaires were incomplete and were therefore dropped, leading to a final sample size of 257. To disguise the objective of this study and to reduce the possibility of demand effects, this study was introduced to subjects as a study on consumer satisfaction with ATM services and ice-cream restaurants. Subjects were told to evaluate their most recent experience with both products. The order of the products, and the order of the satisfaction measures were randomised to minimise potential order effects and to allow for their testing. In total, 12 versions of questionnaires with different orders of products and satisfaction measures were distributed to the subjects randomly.

The hypotheses advanced in this paper require measures that have anchors with different content dimensions, that is, affect and cognition. Therefore, scales with predominantly affective anchors (e.g. the Delighted-Terrible (DT) scale), and scales with mostly cognitive anchors (e.g. the Percentage scale) needed to be included in this study. After reviewing the satisfaction literature, nine satisfaction measures were chosen to be tested (see Table 1). All nine scales are commonly used in applied and/or academic research. Six of the nine measures were single- item overall satisfaction measures, and three of them were multiitem overall satisfaction measures.

Other measures used in this study included Russell’s pleasure and arousal scales, two disconfirmation measures, post purchase behavior scales, and Batra and Athola's (1990) product benefits scale (refer to Table 2 for details).

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Insert Tables 1 & 2 about here

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A two step method was used to determine the affective and cognitive content of all nine satisfaction measures. First, an exploratory factor analysis was conducted on the six items of the Pleasure scale together with the two one-item Disconfirmation measures. It was expected that two factors would be extracted, each represented by affect and cognition respectively. Specifically, the Pleasure scale should capture the affective dimension, and the Disconfirmation scale, the cognitive dimension of consumption as highlighted in the literature review. Second, a correlation analysis was conducted between the factor scores obtained, and the nine satisfaction measures. This analysis helped to determine the content of the satisfaction measures, that is, whether they are cognitive or affective or both. A similar approach has been used in the past by Westbrook (1983), when he examined the correspondence of consumers’ emotional product usage experiences to consumer satisfaction measures, and by Williams (1988), who examined the shared variance between job satisfaction measures and two factors representing affect and cognition.

Both the samples (i.e., the ice-cream restaurant and the ATM service) were combined for this analysis. An exploratory factor analysis was first conducted on the six indicators of Pleasure (Pleas1, Pleas2, Pleas3, Pleas4, Pleas5 and Pleas6), and the two indicators of Disconfirmation (Disc1 and Disc2) using Direct Oblimin Rotated Component Analysis. This method was used, as it was assumed that the two constructs Pleasure and Disconfirmation would be correlated. The analysis resulted in only two factors with eigenvalues above 1. The two factors explained more than 60% of the variance (37.7% of variance for the first factor, and 22.9% for the second).