Satisfaction No.3: Cruel reality - your customers are not satisfied You might have done a customer satisfaction research and got a wrong anwser that they are satisfied. << Satisfaction No.2 One of the things that amuse me last few years is looking at different satisfaction research results. Customers or employees. It is very typical that they consist of at least one such graph: (Employee satisfaction with different aspects of their work - click for larger image) Followed by interpration: your employees are somehow satisfied with the work conditions and product quality, yet a bit less with possibilities for education and personal development... If you have such a research, you might be having big problems. Much bigger then you imagine. Your employees (or customers) are actually not satisfied. And what is your actual problem? First you assume that your employees are "somehow satisfied" with the factors that have a higher score. But a research we have been doing for 5 years have shown that these anwsers actually mean they are "somehow unsatisfied". Their expectations are not met. To discover this, you must first make a research that will show what are your employees (or customers) expectations and what is their perception of the outcome related to the expectations. Result that comes even in the most nice environments are as follows: Black line shows the average expectations and the blue line the average perception of the reality. Difference between them is allways negative. Expectfully negative since this is human nature. Whenever our expectations are met, we raise them a little bit. So our expectations are actually on higher level then the perception of reality in long term. And the difference between them is unsatisfaction. Yes we are talking about averages here. Reality on daily basis is much more complex and dynamic. There are even people that are outstandingly satisfied in a given moment. More about it (if you like slovenian language): Employees satisfaction research based on expectations theories paper Dušan