Cross-cultural comparability of customer satisfaction measurement – the case of mobile phone service providers

Purpose Customers from different cultures might have different expectations and perceptions of quality, leading to different levels of satisfaction. Together with the construct and measurement equivalence issues of cross-cultural surveys, this raises the question of the comparability of customer satisfaction measurements across countries. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the survey method of anchoring vignettes as a tool for improving the comparability of customer satisfaction measurements across countries and to shed some light on cultural influences on customer satisfaction measurements. Design/methodology/approach Based on the models of American Customer Satisfaction Index and European Performance Satisfaction Index, the authors designed and conducted a survey using the method of anchoring vignettes to measure and compare customer satisfaction with mobile phone services in four countries – Costa Rica, Poland, Sweden and Thailand. The survey was carried out with young adults aged 20–30 years, who were mostly university students. Findings This study demonstrates how anchoring vignettes can be used to mitigate cultural bias in customer satisfaction surveys and to improve both construct and measurement equivalence of the questionnaire. The results show that different conclusions on cross-cultural benchmarking of customer satisfaction would be drawn when using a traditional survey compared to the anchoring vignettes method. Originality/value This paper evaluates the survey method of anchoring vignettes as a potential quantitative research method for studying customer satisfaction across countries. The results also contribute to customer satisfaction research as these shed some light onto how culture influences customer satisfaction measurements. The practical implication for firms and managers is that allocating resources among different countries based on traditional customer satisfaction surveys may be misleading.

Self-Evaluation, Differential Item Functioning, and Longitudinal Anchoring Vignettes

Anchoring vignettes are a powerful instrument to detect systematic differences in the use of self-reported ordinal survey responses. Not taking into account the (non-random) heterogeneity in reporting styles across different respondents may systematically bias the measurement of the variables of interest. The presence of such individual heterogeneity leads respondents to interpret, understand, or use the response categories for the same question differently. This phenomenon is defined as differential item functioning (DIF) in the psychometric literature. A growing amount of cross-sectional studies apply the anchoring vignette approach to tackle this issue but its use is still limited in the longitudinal context. This chapter introduces longitudinal anchoring vignettes for DIF correction, as well as the statistical approaches available when working with such data and how to investigate stability over time of individual response scales.