Article Summary
Customer satisfaction has become one of important factors to success of a business in contemporary highly competitive business environment. Modern customers expect and demand for product and services that respond to their needs. To satisfy and therefore attract and retain customers, contemporary businesses make various initiatives. In the article “Evaluating Customer Satisfaction as an Aspect of Quality Management”, Krivobokova (2009) discusses how quality management can be used to achieve customer satisfaction.
At the minimum, customers expect quality products and services that meet their both physical and psychological needs. According to Krivobokova (2009), understanding and responding to varying customer needs can be challenging and costly. Providing quality products and services, according to Krivobokova, is one of the effective ways to achieve customer satisfaction.
Every business has one primary objective for existence and that is making profit. For a business to make profit, it is imperative for it to have sufficient customers for its products and services. Having customers, however, is not enough; a business should retain its customer and attract new customers to realize sustainable profitability.
Retaining customers and attracting new customers however is a major challenge to many businesses. According to Krivobokova (2009), having systems to assess customer satisfaction is not enough. In addition to assessing customer satisfaction to products and services, a business should be able to integrate the outcome in all areas of a business.
Although developing new products can be one of the strategies to realize customer needs, the approach can be very costly and fail to be lead to profitability. According to Krivobokova (2009), improving the quality of existence products and services progressively is the feasible way to satisfy customers as well as remaining profitable.
“Customer satisfaction affects the efficiency of the company’s operation as a whole” (Krivobokova 566). In essence, every aspect of a business; from sales, finance to operations is affected by customer satisfaction.
Krivobokova (2009), in fact, asserts that every individual in a business should consider himself as a sales person to products and services of the company. Accordingly, each individual in business should make the appropriate actions that can improve customer experience. To achieve the goal, however, appropriate methods for evaluating customer satisfaction should be prevalent.
According to Krivobokova (2009), effective evaluation of customer satisfaction is depended on ability of employees of an organization to use information from market research to help their organization gain competitive advantage, and value of devices used to capture customer related information. For an organization to achieve customer satisfaction through quality products and services, market researchers should play an integral part in business decision instead of just being information providers (Krivobokova 566).
Matching effort for customer satisfaction and quality of a product or service has many benefits to an organization. In a sense, customers expect quality of a product or service to improve with time. However, when improving existent products and services organization should ensure that the improvement leads to improved customer satisfaction as well as ensure that profitability of an organization is retained or improved.
According to Krivobokova (2009), an organization should consider that contemporary consumer are much informed and can obtain similar products or services from many competitors. Accordingly, providing quality products not only helps a organization to satisfy and retain customers but also avoid negative publicity that can result from providing products and services that do not satisfy customers.
Analysis
Today businesses are becoming more customers oriented. Success of a business in the current business environment is highly depended on ability of a business to satisfy its customer. Customer satisfaction however is somehow complex and depends on many factors. An initiative to improve customer satisfaction can be counterproductive especially where customer needs are not captured. Among other factors that customers expect in a product or service, is quality.
Quality, in a sense, is relative since it is dependent on quality of other similar products and services. However, providing quality products and services is taken as one of the strategies to competitive advantage. Krivobokova (2009) therefore addresses a very relevant issue in business today. The author demonstrates in-depth understanding on issues on customer satisfaction in contemporary business environment.
Quality and reliability of an article is highly depended on competence of the scholars that contribute to the paper. Proceedings of World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, the journal that publishes the article, only accepts articles from distinguished scholars. For one to qualify to publish with the journal, one must have minimum qualification of a PHD. Krivobokova is therefore a renowned scholar in his field. Besides the article, the author has other academic articles.
Organizations use various approaches to enhance customer satisfaction, including developing new product that match customer needs. In a way, the article tries to demonstrate the value of improving quality of existing products instead of developing new products as potential approach to customer satisfaction. The author shows not only the value of improving quality in customer satisfaction but also explain how the objective can be realized. The article assumes that customer satisfaction is desired and is a common objective for many businesses.
Works Cited
Krivobokova, Olga. Evaluating Customer Satisfaction as an Aspect of Quality Management. Proceedings of World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology 41 (2009): 565-568