Customer satisfaction and retention: the experiences of individual employees

The purpose of this study was to explore how the employees of a company experience the concepts of customer satisfaction and retention. A phenomenological method was used, allowing the informants’ own interpretations to be discovered. Satisfaction was discussed from three perspectives: definition of the concept, how to recognise when a customer is satisfied, and how to enhance satisfaction. The informants’ experience pertaining to these three categories varied, and a total of seven ways to define, recognise or enhance satisfaction were discovered. These were: service, feeling, chemistry, relationship and confidence, dialogue, complaints and retention. All except the first two of these categories of experience were found to enhance retention, implying that the informants have found that strategies for enhancing both satisfaction and retention are similar. The strongest connection between retention and satisfaction strategies turned out to be in terms of relationship and confidence.