Satisfaction Survey Research

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Satisfaction Survey Research

Current Survey Background

Perhaps no other research tool utilized by social scientists is as sensitive to social and technological change as the sample survey. Survey research is a multibillion dollar industry in the United States. Surveys provide critical information to decision-makers in government and business. Polls and their results are widely discussed by the general public and media. Because of the size, complexity, and expense of major surveys, which can include tens of thousands of respondents and exceed $100 million in cost, surveys inevitably come to reflect social and technological change.

Survey practice has followed social and technological change in recent decades. The widespread diffusion of phones throughout American society led to the widespread adoption of telephone interviewing by survey organizations in the 1960s and 1970s. Similarly, the development of computing led directly to the development of computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI), computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI), and web-based surveys. Advances in computing and telephone technology have led to developments in survey methods such as email, web-based and interactive voice response (IVR).

Public attitudes toward privacy and confidentiality have impacted participants’ willingness to take part in surveys in general. Survey researchers have seen the rise of telemarketing, along with call screening, as a contributing factor in the decline in survey response rates over the last couple decades. This has led to higher costs in conducting surveys. The bind of higher costs and lower response rates has fueled new theories to deepen the understanding of nonresponse and its implications for the accuracy of survey estimates. Because of the enormous cost associated with using interviewers to administer surveys, there is little reservation that researchers will continue to investigate how to make them more effective at collecting survey data. These rising costs also create significant constraints on efforts to maintain survey response rates. Along with rapid technological changes, the cost of surveys will remain the likely concern behind the search for new and better methods to conduct surveys.

Customer Satisfaction Relationships

Customer satisfaction is a primary organizational survey used by companies and organizations in the service and business industries. Customer satisfaction is related to customer loyalty, which in turn is related to profitability. The service profit chain (Heskett et al., 1994) hypothesizes that customer satisfaction ( customer loyalty ( profitability. The service management literature argues that customer satisfaction is the result of a customer’s perception of the value received in a transaction or relationship.

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