Customer satisfaction and investment: Can different operationalizations provide reliable results?

Scientific Essay from the year 2011 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, , language: English, abstract: The question, whether customer satisfaction is a reliable indicator for successful financial investment is a rather new field of study. Mainly promoted by Fornell and his associates, the question at first sight, seems to be an empirical question, i.e. a question whether customer satisfaction has anything to add to prediction accuracy of financial performance models. However, this macro-economic view on customer satisfaction is just one of two possible views, the other being the question whether individual investor's satisfaction provides any kind of clue as to future investment decisions taken by the respective investor. Already, the smooth surface of customer satisfaction models advocated in order to show correlations between investment and satisfaction begins to get wrinkled. Further worry lines emerge, once questions like 'is customer satisfaction measured in a consistent fashion?' or 'is customer satisfaction unanimously defined?' are asked. This brief research paper will ask exactly these questions and it will do so for the newly emerging field of research linking financial investment and performance with customer satisfaction. Given this agenda, the structure of this paper is straightforward. First, results of a search, gathering papers that deal with customer (Investor) satisfaction and financial performance or financial investment will be reported, then the respective definitions of customer satisfaction will be scrutinized for communalities and differences. Furthermore, differences in the measurement of customer satisfaction will be reported and assessed, and finally, results of the research scrutinized in this paper will be reported before the background of the results gathered so far. A summary of results and the most important conclusions to be drawn from this research will be reported in the final chapter of this paper.