Customer Satisfaction Measurement to Identify Areas for Improvement in Higher Education Research Services

Determining the level of customer satisfaction and capturing customer views regarding organization performance is one of the important issues that organizations face in the current competitive era. Monitoring customer satisfaction trend helps organizations to take appropriate actions in order to maintain an a decent place in the market. Although many organizations claim that they developed reasonable methods for capturing customers’ view points, however the lack of a systematic method that allows for the measurement of customer satisfaction in terms of a numerical indicator is an stumbling block that stops them from achieving higher performance. In service organizations such as educational systems where the output is intangible and low performance can easily lead to customer dissatisfaction, the need for having an effective measurement system in place should be an outmost concern. In this paper, a model for measuring the level of customer satisfaction in higher education institutes is developed using different statistical techniques. The detailed analyses considered in the proposed model allow the user to effectively estimate the customers’ notion of research administration quality services. The case study considered in this research demonstrates the effectiveness of the conceptual model proposed here in measuring the level of customer satisfaction properly leading to the identification of areas for service improvement.