Customer satisfaction in industrial markets: dimensional and multiple role issues

While customer satisfaction has recently attracted a lot of attention among academics and practitioners, most academic research on this construct has focused on consumer goods using the individual consumer as the unit of analysis. Customer satisfaction in industrial markets is an under-researched area so far. The authors develop a valid customer satisfaction measure for industrial customers (called INDSAT). The development of the scale is based on field interviews as well as statistical analyses of two large samples of over 2500 customer responses in 12 European countries. The scale consisting of seven distinct satisfaction dimensions exhibits desirable psychometric properties. The seven-dimensional structure is found to be superior to more parsimonious structures. Additionally, the authors hypothesize differences in the satisfaction dimensions' importance across different roles in the buying center (referred to as "multiple role issues"). These considerations are supported by empirical results. Implications of the findings for researchers and industrial marketers are furthermore discussed. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.