Customer Satisfaction across Organizational Units

This article examines customer satisfaction models for assessing the relationship of overall satisfaction with a product or service and satisfaction with specific aspects of the product or service for organizations having multiple units or subunits. These units could be stores, markets, dealers, divisions, and so on. The authors suggest a method for studying whether the drivers of overall satisfaction vary across such units. For cases where the drivers do vary across subunits, they show how additional variables can be included in a model to account for the variation. The authors illustrate this approach by studying customer satisfaction in the newspaper and health care industries. They use generalizability theory to evaluate the reliability of scales from multistage cluster sample designs. It is argued that the approach has important implications for both theory and practice.