Customer satisfaction measurement methods and an application of SERVQUAL for a news channel

As today?s world gets more competitive and information driven, it gets even more important to understand the drivers of customer satisfaction and to address any areas of dissatisfaction. Consumers are no longer happy with sub-optimum solutions and get more and more demanding with every new offering provided to them. One key characteristic of today?s successful companies is their ability to proactively manage their customers? satisfaction by measuring in right intervals and adjusting their offering accordingly. An additional level of complexity companies need to face today have to do with the increasing service spend by consumers and how they perceive service quality ? as many aspects tend to be less tangible compared to product offerings.SERVQUAL is widely used to address this concern by defining customer satisfaction as the gap between predicted service and perceived service level. This study aims at an implementation of this technique in a non-personal service setting: namely a news channel. A qualitative study is conducted with news managers and a selected audience to understand how relevant each SERVQUAL dimension is to determine satisfaction levels in Broadcast TV. As a result, reliability, assurance, tangibles and responsiveness are selected for further investigation. Informed with this selection, a quantitative study is conducted to measure customer satisfaction and to identify areas of concern / problems for the selected broadcaster: NTV.This thesis tries to understand the gaps and differences between customer?s perception of service quality and their expectations in news broadcasting industry. Besides, NTV as news channel will also be investigated to find out its weak and strong areas.For doing so, a survey has been performed on customers of NTV News channel in Turkey, questionnaires were distributed among them and the results analyzed and finally the conclusions and implications were discussed.