Customer Satisfaction – The Roleof Transparency

ABSTRACT The popularity of the EPSI Rating framework has grown considerably over the last few years and more and more companies are using this sort of information in their strategic planning process. The primary result of interest for businesses is the level of the seven indices in the EPSI Rating framework values and we know quite a lot about the behavior of the EPSI Rating framework with respect to the index values (Fornell, 1992; Fornell et al., 1996; Eskildsen et al., 1999, 2003; Kristensen et al., 2001; Juhl et al., 2002; Selivanova et al., 2002; Eskildsen et al., 2003; Kristensen & Westlund, 2003) as well as the structure of the framework (Eskildsen et al., 2004). We know however very little about how the structure of the individual markets with respect to, for instance, how the transparency of products and services affects customer satisfaction. The aim of this article is to analyze the effect of the transparency of products and services on customer satisfaction with respect to Danish mobile phone companies, banks and supermarkets from 2004 based on the authors' experiences from the various analyses conducted within the EPSI rating initiative.