ESSAY 1. Customer satisfaction may be the single most critical factor in a corporation's ability to show a profit. It also may be one of the most complex and difficult to master. A business may spend its entire life focusing on the challenge of keeping its customers satisfied, and may never get it right. Yet the business that considers this task unimportant does so at the risk of its continued existence.
Business consists of an exchange of goods or services with a buyer. Business does not exist without at least one customer, and, even in a monopoly, that customer must experience at least enough benefit from the transaction in order to want to continue the relationship. A business which has no customers cannot remain viable.
Yet "satisfaction" can be elusive. As every student of basic communications theory and every individual who has completed even one big-ticket purchase knows, "buyer's remorse" is a common reaction to the close of many transactions. Even when a customer has made an informed decision with a company that has paid careful attention to the customer's genuine needs and worked hard to match the product to those needs while also attending to consideration of the people involved, it is natural for the customer to have at least a moment of reconsideration or doubt. Businesses, transactions, goods, and services are, after all, created and exchanged by human beings.
The exchange is complicated by the fact that individual human beings, with their own personal likes and dislikes, prejudices and preferences, are usually acting on behalf of a larger entity, the company for which they work. That organization has its own policies, needs, ways of working - in short, its own personality that must be satisfied by the exchange enough to continue the relationship in future exchanges. Because the corporation itself is not a human being who can be listened to and questioned, it may seem a daunting task to keep this n...