Customer Perception

Customer satisfaction is the key to the success of any industry. Services that meet or go beyond the expectations of its customers attain customer satisfaction. This could be attained by understanding customer expectations as well as customer perceptions about the service. We have already seen what could be the possible customer expectations in service industry and what factors affect these expectations.

Let us now look at what customer perception means and what shapes these perceptions.

Customer perception is fundamental to understand in a marketing process. It shapes customers’ buying decisions. Customer perception is a customer’s impression and consciousness about a service offered. Typically these could be affected by advertising, social

Initial studies focused on personal man-to-man interactions to be service encounters. Currently the service encounter has evolved to mean ant interaction between the customer and the firm, including technology based encounters, telephonic encounters, mail related encounters as well as those that happen inside the organisation.

Losing a customer to a bad service experience would have staggering impacts on the business.

Customer satisfaction in a service marketing context is, as the name suggests a customer’s satisfaction from receiving a service. A customer is satisfied when his expectations are fulfilled by the service firm. Customer expectation therefore, is defined as the feeling that a customer experience when a service offering meets his or her expectations. In a marketing context, it is a measure as well. It is a measure by which the service quality is judged, as well as the calculation of which the service firm intends to improve or develop its service offerings.

Improving customer satisfaction is one of the important goals of any service firm. Some firms evaluate their employees on the grounds of their ability to please and satisfy their customers. Companies reward their employees on these grounds as

A satisfied customer is likely to come back for repeated or further service. Hence, customer loyalty largely depends on the extent of customer satisfaction the provider is able to provide the customer in each service encounter. Exceeding customer expectations brings customer delight. Satisfying or delighting the customer in the service exchange is the key mantra to marketing success which is now identified and taken with due importance in modern day business marketing. A customer retained is a business success. Companies today employ strategies for retaining customers in order to develop customer loyalty. Long term customer relations are ensured with long-term relationship management and relationship marketing. Service firms engage in recruiting competitive employees and training them in order to satisfy their customers, thereby safeguarding their service success.

According to Kotler and Armstrong customer satisfaction is the “the extent to which a product’s perceived performance matches buyers’ expectations”. Customer satisfaction largely depends on the way in which the customer perceives their experience. Getting customer perceptions right is the job of the