Economic influences on customer satisfaction: an international comparison Online publication date: Wed, 11-Mar-2009
by Bjorn Frank, Takao Enkawa
International Journal of Business Environment (IJBE), Vol. 2, No. 3, 2009
Abstract: 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.
Existing subscribers:
Go to Inderscience Online Journals to access the Full Text of this article.
If you are not a subscriber and you just want to read the full contents of this article, buy online access here.Complimentary Subscribers, Editors or Members of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Business Environment (IJBE):
Login with your Inderscience username and password:
Want to subscribe?
A subscription gives you complete access to all articles in the current issue, as well as to all articles in the previous three years (where applicable). See our Orders page to subscribe.
If you still need assistance, please email subs@inderscience.com
Our Blog 
Follow us on Twitter 
Visit us on Facebook