Managing customer satisfaction through efficient listening tools: an evaluation of best practice in four world-class companies

Measuring customer satisfaction leads to identifying ways to improve product/service quality, which in turn leads to increasing the company's competitive advantage. This best-practice study examines four world-class companies, two of which are multinational corporations and the others are two of the largest companies in the UK. One of the objectives of this study is to examine how best-practice companies use various listening tools to obtain information about customers' needs, preferences, and perceptions of their performance. Another is to identify some best practices, which are salient activities for managing customer perception and satisfaction. The primary contribution of this article is its discussion of a variety of different customer listening tools used by firms and the creation of both a fitness framework and an implementation framework.