Measuring Satisfaction with Services when the Customer Is Not the Consumer

Typically, nonprofit and public institutions offer their customers services as opposed to manufactured, marketed, tangible products. Marketers in the not-for-profit and public sectors must be aware of the ways in which traditional, product-bound marketing tools must be changed to accommodate the unique nature of services. This paper considers how measures of customer satisfaction are inadequate to capture satisfaction with services especially in the situation typical to nonprofits where the customer (purchaser) of the service, is a different person from the consumer (user) of the service. This customer-consumer differentiation is necessary because it appears that in the case of high involvement services in which the customer is not the consumer, inflated satisfaction ratings occur when conventional measures are applied. It is argued that these ratings may be caused by a desire to avoid dissonance or by a faulty attribution process, but whatever their cause, new measures of satisfaction need to be developed to accommodate the special nature of these services.