The combined median rank-based Gini index for customer satisfaction analysis

The quality assessment represents a relevant topic especially with regard to several real contexts. Currently, firms and services suppliers pay particular attention to customer satisfaction surveys in order to investigate about the "perceived quality" feature. Typically, a useful tool to obtain information about the customer satisfaction degree is represented by the quality questionnaires. The use of quality questionnaires implies that the collected data mostly assume ordinal nature. A contribution in dealing with ordinal data is provided by this paper. Here, we propose a novelGinimeasure built on ranks. By combining it with themedian index, one can depict the customer satisfaction degree by exploiting information coming from the responses given to the quality questionnaires items.