Customer satisfaction research is that area of marketing research which focuses on customers' perceptions with their shopping or purchase experience.
Many firms are interested in understanding what their customers thought about their shopping or purchase experience, because finding new customers is generally more costly and difficult than servicing existing or repeat customers.
Many people are familiar with "business to customer" (B2C) or retail-level research, but there are also many "business to business" (B2B) or wholesale-level projects commissioned as well.
Famous quotes containing the words customer, satisfaction and/or research:
“A good customer should not change his shop, nor a good shop change its customers.”
—Chinese proverb.
“Besides, our action on each other, good as well as evil, is so incidental and at random, that we can seldom hear the acknowledgments of any person who would thank us for a benefit, without some shame and humiliation. We can rarely strike a direct stroke, but must be content with an oblique one; we seldom have the satisfaction of yielding a direct benefit, which is directly received.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“... research is never completed ... Around the corner lurks another possibility of interview, another book to read, a courthouse to explore, a document to verify.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973)