Economic influences on customer satisfaction: an international comparison

The marketing literature has extensively analysed firm-level influences on customer satisfaction. Since macro-level customer satisfaction data have not become available until recently, researchers have just taken first steps towards analysing economic influences on customer satisfaction. Identifying economic influences is important because their existence would impair the interpretability of corporate customer satisfaction surveys. Using principal component and regression analyses, we examine economic influences on customer satisfaction across a number of countries: Denmark, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Sweden and the USA. Our analyses reveal that economic expansion exerts a positive influence on customer satisfaction, whereas economic expectations exert a negative influence. As a measure to improve today's quality management practices, we thus recommend that firms correct the scores of multiperiod customer satisfaction surveys for economic influences.