Customer satisfaction is the overall impression of customer about the supplier and the products and services delivered by the supplier. Following are the important factors that could affect customer satisfaction:
- Departmentwise capability of the supplier.
- Technological and engineering or re-engineering aspects of products and services.
- Type and quality of response provided by the supplier.
- Supplier’s capability to commit on deadlines and how efficiently they are met.
- Customer service provided by the supplier.
- Complaint management.
- Cost, quality, performance and efficiency of the product.
- Supplier’s personal facets like etiquettes and friendliness.
- Supplier’s ability to manage whole customer life cycle.
- Compatible and hassle free functions and operations.
The above factors could be widely classified under two categories i.e. suppliers behavior and performance of product and services. The supplier’s behavior mostly depends on the behavior of its senior subordinates, managers and internal employees.
All the functional activities like customer response, direct product and maintenance services, complaint management etc. are the factors that rely on how skillful and trained the internal and human resources of the supplier are.
The second category is regarding all the products and services. This depends on the capability of supplier to how to nurture the products and service efficiently and how skilled the employees are.
It’s all about how the skills are implemented to demonstrate engineering, re-engineering and technological aspects of the products and services.
The quality and efficaciousness of the products is also an important factor that enables compatible and hassle free functions and operations. This bears to lower maintenance and higher life of the product which is highly admired by the customers.
If the product is having some problem or compatibility issues and requires frequent maintenance and support than the customers could get irritated and possibilities of sudden divert is there which lead to supplier’s financial loss. In the same way if the product is expecting huge amount of financial and manual resources then customers could get a feeling of dissatisfaction and worry. However, if these aspects are handled efficiently by giving class services and dealing with complaints effectively then dissatisfied customers could be converted into long time satisfied customers and retaining them becomes easy.
It is practically impossible for the supplier to provide all the above explained features. There are always some positive as well as negative features in products and services which could lead to delight or irritate customers.
The final opinion is the sum of overall experiences which a customer percept. But it is also true that more the positive aspects, the more the customer is satisfied. Hence the aim of the supplier should be always to enhance these positive feelings among all the customers to increase customer satisfaction.
The supplier must identify how to enhance these positive aspects to maximum level by analyzing the customer’s data and information using CRM system. The individual liking and disliking of customers differ from customer to customer. It is hence required to target a customer and identify individual requirement to make them satisfied.
Having discussed the above factors that affect customer satisfaction we can say that higher the satisfaction level, higher is the sentimental attachment of customers with the specific brand of product and also with the supplier. This helps in making a strong and healthy customer-supplier bonding. This bonding forces the customer to be tied up with that particular supplier and chances of defection are very less.
Hence customer satisfaction is very important panorama that every supplier should focus on to establish a renounced position in the global market and enhance business and profit.
