Matching the characteristics of a service to the preferences of customers

The central task of any market‐oriented firm is to ensure that its product provides a mix of attributes that is consistent with the preferences of its customers. Attempts to measure the extent to which products meet consumer needs are often fraught with difficulties associated with eliciting and analysing the responses. We propose a simple index that can be applied to ordinal or cardinal data and will provide a convenient summary of the extent to which a product meets consumer expectations. The index, though simple, is shown to be robust, and is applied to the problem of analyzing the quality of banking services provided to small firms in the UK.