Assessing industrial buyers' perceptions of quality and their effects on satisfaction

Identifying and measuring the dimensions of perceived quality and their influence on customer satisfaction are important aspects of a firm's quality management efforts. In this study, we develop and test a framework for assessing the perceptions held by industrial buyers from different functional areas (e.g., engineering, purchasing) and the link between those perceptions and customer satisfaction. A procedure for identifying the dimensions of quality and using them to target the industrial marketer's quality improvements is discussed, and the results of testing this methodology are presented. The results suggest that a potentially unique set of quality factors can be used to assess each vendor and that these factors vary across functional area.