Customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction, a business term, is a measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or surpass customer expectation. It is seen as a key performance indicator within business and is part of the four perspectives of a Balanced Scorecard will vary from person to person.

In a competitive marketplace where businesses compete for customers, customer satisfaction is seen as a key differentiator and increasingly has become a key element of business strategy. There is a substantial body of empirical literature that establishes the benefits of customer satisfaction for firms. 

Organizations are increasingly interested in retaining existing customers while targeting non-customers measuring customer satisfaction provides an indication of how successful the organization is at providing products and/or services to the marketplace. The level of satisfaction can also vary organization's products.

Customer satisfaction is an ambiguous and abstract concept and the actual manifestation of the state of satisfaction and product/service to product/service. The state of satisfaction depends on a number of both psychological and physical variables which correlate with satisfaction behaviors such as return and recommend rate.