Customer Satisfaction Analysis

Customer satisfaction is noted to be an ambiguous area with no conceptual framework, especially in public transportation (Kostakis & Pandelis, 2009). Customer Satisfaction is indeed intangible and a central concept in marketing literature (Angelova & Zekiri, 2011), business and the academic world (Tikkanen & Alajoutsijaui, 2002). It has attracted an increasing interest and importance since 1950’s till today (Bilgin, 2010). The actual manifestation of satisfaction would differ from person to person and product/service to product/service. Peyton, et al., (2003) note that it would indeed be an understatement to say that there is no general agreement on how to define satisfaction. The most commonly used conceptualizations are based on two perspectives: cumulative and transaction (Gandhi & Kang, 2006). Several authors agree that there is a need to adopt cumulative definition of satisfaction (Johnson, 2002) because cumulative satisfaction is a more fundamental indicator of the firm's past, current, and future performance (Hsu, 2008) instead of specific transactional information about a product or service encounter.

Earlier studies on consumer satisfaction view it as a single variable which involves a single evaluative exercise from the customers and may not be related to how many times the consumer has made use of such a service or pre-evaluative exercise. By this, customer satisfaction goes through the furnace of experiencing a service to evaluating it. The experience might be pleasurable but yet unsatisfactory because it fails to be as pleasurable as expected. So satisfaction/dissatisfaction isn't an emotion, it's the evaluation of the emotion" (Hunt, 1977).

Metters et al., (2006) define satisfaction as the consumer’s fulfilment resp...

... middle of paper ...

...012) in a study in Pakistan through purposive sampling of 120 questionnaires (60 male and 60 female of different age and different status) seek to find out how service quality influences customer satisfaction. It was revealed in the study through multiple regression that there was a positive relationship between service quality and customer satisfaction in the public transport sector in Pakistan.

Kwabena et al.,’s (2013) study investigated passengers’ level of satisfaction of Metro Mass Transit Ltd.’s service delivery in Koforidua, Ghana through accidental sampling of 200 questionnaires adopting a modified SERVQUAL model. The analysis revealed that The study revealed that about 60% of MMT passengers are satisfied; about 20% are indifferent, while the remaining 20% are dissatisfied. This indicates that 40% of the passengers could switch to other service providers.