Importance and quality of service quality dimensions : a model based approach

The importance that users or customers attach to various services and products is an essential part of customer satisfaction surveys. Some proposals for linking satisfaction and importance can be found in available literature. The objective is to identify and understand the dimensions with high importance but low perceived quality. These dimensions are primary candidates for focused improvement initiatives. In this study, we propose to apply a class of statistical models, denoted as CUB models, generally used to estimate the feeling and the uncertainty, to measure the importance of items on observed overall satisfaction. A questionnaire with explicit variables of importance for each dimension is considered to compare the obtained ranks with the observed ones. Then the estimated importance and the perceived quality, both obtained with the CUB models, will be jointly analyzed in different datasets coming from various fields. This approach will be compared with some others reported in the literature.