A New Frontier in Customer Satisfaction Measurement
For companies that wish to find out what things need improvement in order to serve their customers better, the bad news is that the traditional Customer satisfaction Studies (CSS) they are used to have been deemed inadequate.
The good news, however, is that now they can use MOSTER, the revolutionary new CSS model that goes beyond Customer Satisfaction to suggest ways to Delight Customers.
The new model, which was launched at a breakfast held at a city hotel recently, comes to East Africa courtesy of a partnership deal between Consumer Insight and Metric Consultancy, the internationally renowned market research company that developed it. MOSTER is, according to the officials, “set to change the region’s CSS landscape. For good”.
“As far as CSS methods go,” says Ndirangu wa Maina, the MD of Consumer Insight, “MOSTER is a radical improvement on the traditional, widely accepted approach. It is set to change the region’s CSS landscape. For good.” “The old systems,” explains wa Maina, “assume that the more a company delivers on each attribute, the more the customer satisfaction. It treats customer satisfaction as a simple continuum with two extremes of good / bad in quality, and less / more in satisfaction. They tend to focus on “overall satisfaction” as the outcome variable while rating individual attributes as independent variables. They then go on to consider those attributes that highly influence the outcome variable as its key drivers and recommend that only by expending more resources to them can one maximize overall customer satisfaction and hence, enhance customer loyalty.”
The MOSTER system is a whole new ball game,” says Shrinivas Dharmadhikari, the customer satisfaction measurement guru who came to launch it. And he should know, being a director of Metric Consultancy, the global market research organisation with partners in over 50 counties around the globe. Since joining the company he has completed over 1000 projects for MOSTER the company’s flagship product.
“MOSTER is indeed a revolution in customer satisfaction measurement,” he says. “Based on the concept of two dimensional quality as developed by Dr. Noriaki Kano, professor of Science at the University of Tokyo, it separates the customer satisfaction attributes into three different classes, namely the Must-Be attributes - the ones with potential to Dissatisfy; the Attractive attributes - those with potential to Delight; and the Performance attributes – which can either Delight or Dissatisfy.“
“MOSTER,” Ndirangu wa Maina explains further, “also holds that the class of attributes changes from one person to the next – depending on one’s needs and expectations; from one market segment to another; and with time – what delights customers today may, only tomorrow, be the “minimum expected”. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods with specifically developed questionnaires, MOSTER collects data that is later analysed to reveal not just the proportion of customers that are dissatisfied and the proportion that’s satisfied but also point out the best way to delight customers while making the best use of available.”
