An Assessment of the Relationship Between Customer Satisfaction and Service Friendliness

Abstract

Service friendliness has often been assumed to increase customer satisfaction, but that relationship has seldom been experimentally analyzed due to the difficulty of obtaining high customer satisfaction response rates. Consequently, a customer satisfaction data collection system, designed to yield a high customer response rate, was employed in a branch of Shawmut Bank where the relation between process-bank teller service friendlienss, and outcome-customer satisfaction was examined. Additionally, the effect of feedback on service friendliness was examined. Subjects were three tellers whose rates of greeting and smiling and looking at their customers during the first three seconds of the service interaction were obtained by direct observation. Satisfaction data were gathered by asking customers to rate teller service immediately following the interaction by depositing chips into a survey box located in the bank lobby. A customer satisfaction response rate of 99% was obtained using the chips method. Additionally, all three behaviors increased substantially with feedback. Greeting was found to be positively correlated (p < .05) with customer satisfaction.

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