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What is customer satisfaction, after all? According to the disconfirmation paradigm, satisfaction can be defined as “a positive feeling experienced by a consumer following a consumption experience, resulting from a comparison between the expectations towards the product or service and its perceived performance.”
As discussed in previous sections, reviews are fundamentally about expectations. Readers want to ensure the product or service will meet their expectations, while reviewers express whether it did.
While some expectations are generally shared standards (e.g., a product arriving undamaged), others are subjective and vary from person to person (e.g., a product not suiting a specific personal need). Accuracy to the description is a very common expectation, but specific customers may care more about certain aspects of it.
This introduces the concept of criteria, which will be referred to throughout this document, especially in “Categorization and Subjectivity.”
There's also a natural behavior regarding expectations: the higher the expectations, the harder they are to meet, resulting in a lower satisfaction rate. Consequently, two products in the same industry but of different classes (low-end or high-end) could have the same average customer rating.
Finally, the impact of a review varies with the risk a user takes. Dining at a restaurant poses a low risk: if the experience is bad, the loss is minimal—just some money and time. However, hiring a plumber to redo the plumbing in your house involves a much higher risk, making detailed feedback from previous customers far more valuable.
- Ask for the user’s expectations at the end of the purchasing flow to later check if they have been met. This would make the question more personal and insightful for both the business and potential customers.