Customer satisfaction for customers of Checkpoint Perfumes BV

nsumer spending on body care has increased by nearly 10% since 2001 ; this makes the need for understanding the customers even more important. For this purpose Checkpoint regularly run customer satisfaction inquiries (CSI) of different form and intensity. Their goal is to discover critical issues in the customer/sales interaction in order to pro-actively react to avoid losing customers in the future. Marketing research is needed to determine if there are opportunities in the market, to determine if problems exist, to generate refine and evaluate marketing performance,  as it has the purpose of improving the understanding of particular business or management problems, resulting in solutions to a problem, new knowledge limited to problem and findings of practical relevance and value to managers.   The research is conducted every 4 years, and should be comparable to the previous research to some extent. In order to exceed customer expectations, you need to know what the customer wants and needs from Checkpoint; therefore the goal of this research is: “research the customer satisfaction of Checkpoint Perfumes in the Dutch market”, this is achieved by structured telephone surveys.</P> <P>The results of the research among customers include: Customers award Checkpoint Perfumes with a good to very good 8 on overall service quality. Nearly all related questions support the hypothesis formulated by management of 95% customer satisfaction with Checkpoint services:<BR>• Reach ability (95.2%) and quality of telephonic advice (97.8%)<BR>• Delivery times (99.6%) and packaging of delivered goods (96.8%)<BR>• Evaluation of Sales representative (95%)<BR>Important factors, which did not comply with the Management expected from the mean or percentage of the population to be, were:<BR>• Friendliness of staff (94.8%) and handling of complaints (87.8%)<BR>• Overall evaluation of fax/ e-mail offers (91.4%) and catalogue (94.9%)<BR>• General satisfaction with bonus systems (84.5%) and delivery on Saturdays rejected.<BR>When asked what the customer’s opinion is on completeness of assortment, 21.7% deems the assortment: not complete, out of which 66.5% says to miss specific perfumes. This means the biggest cause for customer dis-satisfaction is the in-ability to provide the customer with the requested goods. This perceived feebleness is further emphasised by the fact the 52.5% of customers indicate: Products ´not on stock ´ as a major weakness of Checkpoint perfumes. Ex-customers were interviewed with the goal of exploring their reasoning behind no longer buying with Checkpoint. The most heard reason is: ´ price level ´ to high, followed by the ´minimum order amount´ to obtain free Porto and ´products not on stock´. <BR>Half of Checkpoint ex-customers, who now buy with one of our competitors, indicated to have a renewed interest in becoming a customer of Checkpoint Perfumes, because of the arrival of the Web-Shop. When compared to results from previously held Customer Satisfaction surveys, results were as expected. <BR>Table of Contents<BR>Preface 2<BR>Executive Summary 3<BR>List of Tables and Figures 3<BR>Chapter 1: Introduction 3<BR>Chapter 2: Methodology 3<BR>Research Objectives 3<BR>Research Questions 3<BR>Research Method 3<BR>Survey strategy 3<BR>Research Philosophy 3<BR>Sample plan 3<BR>Chapter 3. Literature research 3<BR>3.1 Customer Satisfaction research 3<BR>3.1.1 Knowledge collection 3<BR>3.2 Grey Marketing 3<BR>3.2.1 Linking model to this research 3<BR>3.3 Trends in Perfumeries and Drugstores 3<BR>Chapter 4: Analysis of customers 3<BR>4.1 S