Satisfaction benchmarking and customer classification: an application to the branches of a banking organization

Banking services constitute a highly competitive market and indicate a representative example of customer-oriented organizations. For this reason, customer satisfaction is of vital importance, offering a quantitative measure for current and future performance of these organizations. On the other hand, classifying customers according to their satisfaction behavior may indicate different client clusters with distinctive preferences and expectations. This approach serves the development of a truly customer-focused culture by determining a set of improvement strategies that best fit the different customer segments. In this paper, the multi-criteria method MUSA is implemented in order to measure and analyze customer satisfaction in different branches of a banking organization. These results are also used to benchmark these branches according to the provided services. Moreover, segmentation analysis is performed in order to identify the different groups of customers and estimate the homogeneity of preferences in distinct customer segments. Data are based on a pilot customer-satisfaction survey, while the most important results are focussed on the determination of the critical service dimensions.