Customer Satisfaction With Communications Services in the US: Room for Improvement?

The study of customer satisfaction and service quality is relatively new. Some of the landmark studies guiding investigations today were published only in the late 1980’s and 1990’s. Given the room for improvement in customer satisfaction with communications services, how can the FCC incorporate these more sophisticated perspectives on customers into our regulatory and policy work? Improving customer satisfaction broadly is it itself an important element of the public interest. Further, higher levels of customer satisfaction are likely to improve communications services’ contribution to the country’s overall production. This paper will review the literature, highlighting several points. 1. An overview of customer metrics from the study of marketing 2. An introduction to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), the most widely used measure of customer satisfaction. 3. The empirical link between a firm’s growing market share and declining customer satisfaction. 4. A discussion of SERVQUAL the most widely used instrument to measure service quality. 5. The positive link between customer satisfaction and a firm’s financial performance 6. The positive link between customer satisfaction and a firm’s stock price 7. Ideas on future work