1.

0 Introduction

Satisfaction is kinds of feeling when you receive something you want, or when
you have done a job which you wanted to do. And also satisfaction is people
powered customer service for everything. It is a place where customers come
together to answer each others questions, and also share ideas with each other
or with an organisation. Breur (2007). Satisfaction can be of many types for
example job satisfaction which means when the person who has got the job for
which he was looking for many months and he got it, we can say that he has
job satisfaction. Another type of satisfaction is self satisfaction for example,
when a person receives something for which he was eager, then that person is
self satisfied.

1.1 Customer satisfaction

According to the marketing point of view, the most important job of the
marketer is to satisfy its customer. According to Breur (2007) customer
satisfaction is an important key to the business success because it exemplifies
value creation for the customers. Satisfaction results in repeat business and as
there are repeat business, the relation of customers and the business will
strengthen, this will inoculate customers from alternative offers. For example,
the job of a car dealer is not only to sell the cars, but his job is to satisfy its
customer’s with after sales service by informing the customer when the
customer’s car is to be serviced and also giving customer important
information about how to maintain his car, so by doing these this not only the
customer is satisfied but he will also be loyal towards the company or the car
dealer. (The business research lab, 2005)

1.3 Measuring customer satisfaction

According to ( Halkias, 2007) there are many ways to gather information from
customer, the simplest way to find how the customers feel and what they want
is to ask them straight away. This is possible if you have 20 clients, in this you
can talk to each one personally. This approach is good efficient because in this
approach you will get a personal feel for each customer. He also states that
there are other forms of studies researchers’ can do to how consumers are
satisfied for example, focus groups in which 5- 10 customers or prospects are
asked questions on a particular service or a product. Next are client surveys, in
these there are standardised questions which are same for all the clients for
example questionnaires. Another form of gathering information are phone
survey, in which surveyors ask questions from clients about there preference.

Let’s take an example of measurement of customer satisfaction in the tourist

industry. In this the quality of tourist experience and how different quality
factors impact on the global satisfaction of tourists are measured. In this
research college students of four distinct encounters are measured.
The aim of this research was to measure how global satisfaction is determined
by attribute based quality factors during the tourists encounter. This study took
four different encounters which college students are most likely to experience
that was eating out, hotel accommodation, renting a car and going on
sightseeing tour.

The data collection was carried in the form of survey over a period of three
weeks at a university in New Zealand. Four samples ere selected and given 1
set of pictures in which one variable was manipulated from the standard
picture. For example for one group the cleanliness of eating out place was
manipulated by placing the picture in which food was shattered on the floor
and with birds eating them. And for the other groups the variables were
changes according to the selected attributes. Other than these questionnaires
were also created and distributed amongst the students, and the students were
told to look closely to each question and scale to mark your degree of
satisfaction. The questions for finding the degree of satisfaction was created as
extremely satisfied and extremely dissatisfied.( Mattsson & chadee, 1996)

These all were the techniques which are used to measure the satisfaction of the
college students on different attributes.
According to (Parasuraman, Berry & Zeithaml) another technique to
measuring satisfaction is a multi item scale which is called servqual scale.
This scale is basically used for measuring service quality. They had also
carried out a study in which customer judgment of service quality was
measured for three types of services, that is telephone repair, retail banking
and insurance. In this study SERVQUAL was used for measuring service
quality of five known organisations, one Telephone Company, two insurance
company and two banks. A questionnaire containing modified instruments was
mailed to about 2000 randomly chosen customers of each of these three
companies. There were also remainder post cards which were send to the
customers after two weeks. The returned rate of the questionnaires was 21
percent. Then after receiving the questionnaires the demographic profile of
five customer samples were reviewed by the top level management of the
respective companies for studying there customers perceptions for the service
quality of there products.

(Ruyter & Bloemer, 1999) argues that customer satisfaction is directly linked
with customer loyalty. If the customer satisfaction is increases at a certain
level then the customer loyalty increases rapidly. To illustrate this statement, a
study was done to confirm the linkage between satisfaction and loyalty. For
this study sample were from the evening classes of five different institutes.
There was an in dept investigation of satisfaction and loyalty amongst these
samples on language, arts, history, bicycle repair. Since these institutes offer
wide range educational services, it is relevant for then for try hard for
customer loyalty.

For this questionnaires were handed over students at the beginning of the
class, and at the end of the class they returned them back. Then different
attributes were measured by different techniques, for example satisfaction was
measured with a five item 9- point Likert scale. Sample items are “I am
satisfied with this evening class” and this class is in agreement with my
expectation. Value attainment was measured by 18 item 9 point response
ranging from “to no extent” to “to a very large extent”. And on the other hand
positive mod as measure by 10 item positive mood scale of positive and
negative affect schedule.

The discussion above shows the techniques used for measuring customer
satisfaction. In this competitive environment, it is very important for an
organisation satisfy its customers, as they are the king of the economy, and to
do this they should measure this with these above stated techniques, so that the
marketers can find the attributes in the product and the service that is not
satisfying the customers.
2.0 Introduction
Research or marketing research is the use of scientific methods in searching for the
truth about marketing phenomena. These activities include defining marketing
opportunities and problems, generating and evaluating marketing ideas monitoring
performance, and understanding the marketing process. Marketing research is more
than conducting surveys, this includes, idea generation, problem definition, searching
information and collecting data either through primary research or secondary research
and after that analysing the data collected ( Zikmund and Babin, 2007) . For example
many firms such as FDA uses marketing research methods to address the way people
view and use various foods and drugs. In the same way any organisation can perform
employ the marketing research methods to notice the perception of their customers on
their products and services.

2.1 Qualitative research

(Zukmund and Babin, 2007) suggests that qualitative research that looks marketing
objectives through techniques that allows the researcher to provide elaborate
interpretations of market without depending on numerical measurements. According
to (Au, 2007) qualitative research is less structured than most quantitative approaches
like questionnaires where there are structured response formats. In qualitative
approaches, the researcher interprets the data to extract its meaning and converts it to
information. It is also argued that, the quantitative approaches are researcher
dependent means in that the researcher must extract meaning from unstructured
responses, for example text from a recorded interview.

2.2 Quantitative research

Quantitative research involves measuring things. Techniques which are used in
quantitative research are surveys, web analytics, data mining, modelling statistical
analysis and predictive analytics. Quantitative methods are perfect for getting at the
nuts and bolts what, when, where and how many questions needed to measure a
certain phenomenon. (McCarthy, 2007). According to (Zikmund and Babin, 2007)
quantitative research is a marketing research tool which addresses research objectives
through empirical assessments that involve numerical measurements and analysis
approaches. For example, quantitative research is quite helpful when a research
objective involves a managerial action standard. For example, a salad dressing
company considered changing its recipe. The new recipe was tested with a sample of
consumers rated the product using numeric scale.

2.3 Qualitative v/s Quantitative research

There are no claims such that qualitative is more important than quantitative, both
qualitative and quantitative techniques of research are equally important; it is just that
they both have different functions or different roles to play in the collection of data.
According to (Zikmund and Babin, 2007) qualitative research can accomplish
research objective that quantitative research cannot. Similarly, quantitative research
can accomplish objectives that qualitative research cannot. The both researches are
equally important in marketing research. He also argues that many research projects
both involve both quantitative and qualitative research. For example, creating a valid
survey measures require deep understanding of the way these concept is to be
measured and how these ideas is expressed in everyday life. Both these tasks
involves qualitative research, on the other hand validating the measures formally to
make sure it can reliably capture concept will require quantitative research. For
instance, P&G conducted a research before taking a product to a new country; the
organisation combined both qualitative and quantitative research for marketing their
product in that market. First P&G wanted to study the marketing problems of their
company. First the researchers started applying qualitative research including in-depth
interviews, observational techniques and focus groups. These interviews gave
researches an inner idea that what are the problems they were facing. After lot of
qualitative research, qualitative research was then carried out which supported the
findings and led to the suggestions.

(Marketing news, 1991) had carried out a study based on the customer satisfaction, in
which both qualitative research and qualitative research were carried out. It suggests
that internal research of employees and organisation is both quantitative and
qualitative. The qualitative phase typically involves interviews with the top
management and focus group with the front line employees and middle managers, in
addition to those with customers. Because the quantitative phase depends on the
insight provided by the qualitative research, then for developing accurate results
quantitative techniques like, questionnaires, surveys are important as they give the
accurate results of the research done in the qualitative phase.

(Swanick, 1988) sheds some light that quantitative research and quantitative research
are both important I carrying out a marketing research. He also states that, in
constructing or purchasing a shoppers survey, it is important to have a balance
between both qualitative research and quantitative research. Qualitative measures
subjective information. For example a shopper survey solely based on the qualitative
research generally consists of a narrative report by the shoppers as how they treated
by the bank employees. He suggests that this information is useful in training of
individual employees, but is difficult to use in determining bank wide performance
averages or trends. On the other hand quantitative measurements provide information
on banker’s performance. This information is important in developing an overall view
of the service and sales provided by the bank. The most effective shopper or any other
survey combines both quantitative and qualitative research techniques.

Qualitative research is marketing research method that plays an important role in

conducting meaning full research. This kind of research is the best development and
exploratory method of marketing research. Qualitative research stands for quality than
quantity. This method requires a list of few people as compared with whole target
audience. And on the other hand, quantitative research, that is the second phase of
research undertakes quantitative marketing research for companies to measure,
quantify, estimate, and segment the market. For example online survey, phone survey,
in person and intercept survey. Both qualitative and quantitative research is equally
important, it is just that qualitative comes first followed by quantitative research
(Marriot, 2006). Quantitative researchers strive to collect large amounts of data using
random selection methods. The rationale for this data is drawn from inferential
statistics and assumes that samples are drawn from a particular population. The larger
the random sample drawn from a given population, the less variation in each selected
sample and the more representative of the given population. Quantitative research is
based on numerical data collection. In contrast, qualitative methods seek to represent
holism and to provide contextual knowledge of the phenomenon being studied. One
goal of qualitative research is to increase understanding of a phenomenon as opposed
to generalizing data extrapolated from the sample to the population at large. Rather
than having a quantitative research outcome of generalized findings (Byrne, 2001).

In conclusion, it is much clear from above discussion that, since both quantitative
research and qualitative research is different, as one focuses on words and another
focuses on numbers, but are equally important in carrying out any kind of marketing
research.
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