Customer Satisfaction in Greek Costal Shipping Services

Customer satisfaction in Greek costal shipping services

Emmanuel GAVALAS

University of Paisley

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Abstract

Customer satisfaction is a fundamental concept in marketing and its pursuit an important goal for businesses (Leavitt, 1983; Webster, 1994).Satisfaction is a “post consumption” experience which compares perceived quality with expected quality, whereas service quality refers to a global evaluation of a firm’s service delivery system (Anderson and Fornell, 1994; Parasuraman et al., 1985).

Customer satisfaction drives future profitability. It is a vital measure of performance for firms, industries, and national economies” (Anderson et al., 1994). By developing knowledge from the customer satisfaction data about the way customers perceive quality (outside-in) it will be possible to take more concrete actions for continuous improvement. (Ton van der Wiele, et al., 2002).

To measure satisfaction we used models that are address to cumulative techniques. They aggregate the manifest variables to measure the explanatory, resultant and consequent “latent” variables. The “latent’ variables (e.g. quality, customer’s expectations, customers’ loyalty) cannot be measured directly. Most known models are the ECSI (European model), and the ACSI (American motel).

These models are measuring the causing and effecting variables and the correlations between them. However these models don’t take into account the importance and demanding values that customers’ have for the specific aspects of the services. The Multicriteria Satisfaction analysis (MUSA) method (Grigoroudis & Siskos 2001) is supplementing the gap of other methods and gives an overall global satisfaction index, in relation to the demanding and importance index of consumers for the specific services sector of coastal shipping in Greece.

The purpose of this survey is to propose an accurate satisfaction measuring in the sector of coastal shipping services in Greece. European and American models for satisfaction measuring and MUSA method are fully exploited so as preferences, needs and the level of demand that customers have for these preferences revealed in order satisfaction measuring is more accurate and beneficial for Greek coastal shipping sector.

Structural equation to the general models and preference desegregations for measuring and analysing customer satisfaction was applied in the context of coastal shipping services in Greece, based on data collected from 142 respondents.

An overall global satisfaction index, a customers’ demanding index, the degree of importance that coastal shipping services product has to consumers and the impact that each of the specific quality criteria/quality dimensions has separately to consumers by virtue of preference disaggregation model.

Findings from an evaluation of correlations between levels of variables that are causing or resulting satisfaction with the structural equation modelling used additionally and separately for comparison, enforcement and confirmation of previous findings.

Key words: Customer satisfaction preference desegregations coastal shipping services