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A product can be characterized by its means (how it is made), material (what it's
made of), form (shape and style), and function (how it works). There are four
classes of products:
information/signs
artifacts/physical objects
activities and services
organizations and systems
The nature of products has changed. Designers used to think of products from the
outside (form and function). The "Good Design" movement is an example of this. But
then, in the latter part of the 20th century, designers began to look at products from
the inside. A chair isn't a back, arms, etc. It is the form of a person sitting. Designers
began to learn (and do) new things from going inside the experience of the person
using the product.
Placing products in a social context introduces rhetoric. And when we look at form,
we also get rhetoric.
A triangle can be drawn with the product, its makers, and its community of use at
each point. The design process synthesizes the voice of the makers with the needs of
the community of use.
However, the importance of customer satisfaction diminishes when a firm has increased
bargaining power. For example, cell phone plan providers, such as AT&T and Verizon,
participate in an industry that is an oligopoly, where only a few suppliers of a certain
product or service exist. As such, many cell phone plan contracts have a lot of fine print
with provisions that they would never get away if there were, say, a hundred cell phone
plan providers, because customer satisfaction would be way too low, and customers
would easily have the option of leaving for a better contract offer.
There is a substantial body of empirical literature that establishes the benefits of customer
satisfaction for firms.
Customer satisfaction is an abstract concept and the actual manifestation of the state of
satisfaction will vary from person to person and product/service to product/service. The
state of satisfaction depends on a number of both psychological and physical variables
which correlate with satisfaction behaviors such as return and recommend rate. The level
of satisfaction can also vary depending on other factors the customer, such as other
products against which the customer can compare the organization's products.
Work done by Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry (Leonard L)[3] between 1985 and 1988
delivered SERVQUAL which provides the basis for the measurement of customer
satisfaction with a service by using the gap between the customer's expectation of
performance and their perceived experience of performance. This provides the researcher
with a satisfaction "gap" which is semi-quantitative in nature. Cronin and Taylor
extended the disconfirmation theory by combining the "gap" described by Parasuraman,
Zeithaml and Berry as two different measures (perception and expectation) into a single
measurement of performance relative to expectation.
The usual measures of customer satisfaction involve a survey[4] with a set of statements
using a Likert Technique or scale. The customer is asked to evaluate each statement in
terms of their perception and expectation of performance of the service being measured.