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1. Journée ULB Sorbonne
Is Customer Satisfaction Theory Relevant in
the SME context
Pierre-Nicolas Schwab
pschwab@ulb.ac.be
Solvay Business School
Université Libre de Bruxelles
16 March 2012

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3. Customer satisfaction at the interface of three
worlds
Large discrepancies exist between large corporations and SMEs (Carson
1998, Lindman 2004, Perks and Shukla 2008) in terms of CS
measurement.
No research yet on CS in SMEs.
Unity or
discrepancies?
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
Have CS best practices been disseminated within SMEs?
What do SMEs do in actuality to satisfy customers?
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4. Interest of the research question
• 99,5% of firms are SMEs
• SMEs account for 51% of GDP
• 50% will cease operations within 3 years
• 75% will cease operations within 7 years
• 26% of bankruptcies are due to misalignment with market
• Marketing theory + practitioner perspective: customer
satisfaction is key to success
 Have CS best practices been disseminated within SMEs?
 What do SMEs do in actuality to satisfy customers?
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5. Literature review
Oliver (2010) framework of cognitive
antecedents (Symanski and Henard 2001)
For each antecedent :
1. Review of marketing literature
(based on Oliver 2010 bibliography)
2. Review of practitioner’s literature
(HBR from 1990 until 2011 +
managerial recommendations of 1)
3. Review of SME / entrepreneurship
literature
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6. Customer satisfaction at the interface of three
worlds
• Satisfaction = antecedent of loyalty and word-of-
Marketing mouth (Oliver 2010)
• Loyalty = antecedent of profits (Hallowell, 1996)
theory • What are the cognitive antecedents of satisfaction?
Managerial • Profits are what firms are created for
• Profits = Loyalty = Satisfaction (Hallowell, 1996)
perspective • What a business should do to satisfy customers
• SME ≠ “Little Big Business” (Hill, 2001)
• Large corporations marketing practices differ from
SME reality SME marketing practices (Hill 2001, Carson and
Gilmore 2000)
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7. The SME reality
Customer satisfaction in actuality
1. Expectancy disconfirmation
– Managerial literature. recommends proactive approach to shape
expectations (Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2000)
– Nothing found in the SME literature
2. Need fulfillment
– driver of competitiveness (Manor, Tatikonda and Sampson 2002).
– sales people in SMEs do focus on the needs of the customer (Hill 2001)
3. Quality
– SMEs can implement TQM successfully (Gallear 1995)
– Drivers for implementation different than large corporations (Sun and
Cheng 2002)
4. Value
– SMEs can adopt different value postures (Little 2004)
– evolution from dyadic buyer-seller relationships to “value constellations”
(Normann and Ramirez 1993) |7

8. The SME reality
Customer satisfaction in actuality
5. Equity / Inequity
– Price fairness: SMEs cope with market practices (Carson & Gilmore 2000)
– Complaints management: one case study (Stokes and Lomax 2001) 
unlikely to be found important by SMEs
6. Regret
– New stream of research (Zeelenberg and Pieters 2007): few
recommendations
– Offer should encompass guarantees to avoid regret (Oliver 2010)
– Nothing found in SME literature (nor in marketing literature)
7. CS measurement
– Morgan, Anderson and Mittal (2005): SMEs in sample collect and use CS
measurement data
– CS measurement makes no sense in SMEs (Lindman 2001;Perks and
Shukla 2008)
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9. Conclusion and further research
Still a lot of knowledge to disseminate
Level of dichotomy found Further research
Quality no -
Regret n/a (lack of research results) Regret management tactics
Needs Techniques and tools to SOCO  SME > large firms? Assessment of
detect unmet needs not used needs by SMEs?
in SMEs  rely on intuition
Expectancies Proactive strategies not SME tactics to shape expectations?
applicable for SME
Complaints Best practices not applied B2C≠B2B? Training and empowerment in
management SMEs? Understanding of complaints
consequences?
Value Intuition-guided value Mutations of value postures along with other
creation antecedents?
CS Rarely applied Quantitative study of measurement? Industry
measurement Makes no sense for SMEs patterns?
according to some authors
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10. 4 Current researches
1. Qualitative interviews with entrepreneurs (30)
– What do they understand of customer satisfaction and marketing in general
– What do they think they do
– What do they actually do for each antecedent
2. Qualitative analysis of actual SMEs answers to customers complaints
– Corpus of ca. 15000 complaints from 297 companies
– Perceived Justice Framework as coding guide
3. Politeness in actual companies’ answers to complaints (in collaboration with
Laurence Rosier, ULB)
– Do firms follow managerial recommendations in terms of politeness ?
– Speed of answer vs. politeness
4. Long-term impact of marketing on venture success in collaboration with
Brussels Enterprise Agency, Brussels Chamber of Commerce
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