Measuring Customer Satisfaction

The modern business environment is flooded with intense competition in most industries and in most markets. In this macro environment it is critical to truly understand the customer. Customers now generally have multiple options for their consumption preferences and can usually find an alternate or substitute product for almost anything. It is not even the finished good itself that must meet the customer's expectations. Increasingly, potential customers are also educated to the internal business practices of an organization they are planning to do business with in regards to social or environmental performance. Therefore, to truly understand the customer organizations now must actually measure the satisfactions levels of their clients in a systematic and detailed basis. It is no longer sufficient to simply use heuristics or sporadic feedback to gauge performance.

In my current position, I am the financial manager for a major defense weapon system; the F-22 Stealth Fighter. This special program office, or SPO resides under the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center (AFLCMC), formally known as ASC. In my current duties, I manage the execution of over $1.2B of Research, Development, Training, Engineering (RDTE) and Production Modification type appropriations. Our customers can be seen primarily as the war fighter. However we do little in the way of gathering feedback from the war fighter directly. So for the paper, I will try and make inferences and create connections to capture the heart of the subject of this paper.

The easiest and most widespread method to collect data about the customer is simply to conduct survey research. This method has many advantages over other alternatives that are used to collect data about customer satisfaction although it has limitations as well. Survey research is relatively convenient and can be performed at minimal cost to the organization. However, there are many steps that must be undertaken to ensure that the survey data is reliable otherwise the whole exercise could end up being counterproductive to organizational goals. When developing survey reliability measures, there are basically three types of validity that should be considered: criterion related validity, content related validity, and construct related validity (Barber, 2010). In short, the survey must measure what it is supposed to measure and the sample should be adequate to provide the researchers reliable insights to what they are investigating.

In many cases conducting a survey to collect data regarding levels of customer satisfaction can be a time consuming and laborious task that many organizations will forgo because they do not trust the results or value the reliability of the results (Harmon, 2009). The DoD uses various type of surveys to collect data on things such as healthcare to pre-deployment concerns. Usually an outside organization is hired to conduct the surveys. Often time military members, spouses, and dependants