This involves obtaining ratings of specific attributes that relate to product performance or service quality. You will want to determine how well you are doing on an absolute basis and relative to your competitors. Clearly, measuring the performance of your product or service is necessary to determine customer satisfaction. However, performance ratings by themselves are insufficient. There are three additional, less obvious factors which, taken together, provide a more accurate measure of customer satisfaction.
Customers become satisfied only when a company meets or, better yet, exceeds their expectations.
This is true regardless of the intrinsic quality of a company's product or service. Thus, customer expectations are as important as company performance in determining customer satisfaction. It is important to recognize as well that expectations are not static. Performance which satisfies a customer today may not be sufficient to satisfy that same customer in tomorrow's competitive environment. As a result, companies need to track changes in customer expectations over time and continually adjust in order to meet those changing expectations.