Case Studies in Customer Satisfaction Research

Results
Although Rutgers University is always concerned about the quality of the experience students receive, Dining Services ensures a high quality dining experience by mandating that all dining halls be rated quarterly, thus enabling a system that helps them evaluate, and subsequently elevate, the quality of their products and services. Their dining halls now compare the students’ expectations of their product quality, variety and performance to the students’ perception of their actual performance. The measured difference between expectation and performance gives them the ability to concentrate resources for improvement. Specifically, SatisTrack™:

Provided Rutgers Dining Services with an understanding of the customer’s viewpoint and allowed them to respond effectively to their needs

Illustrated students’ decision process in dining, and their perceptions of dining options.

Provided an understanding of the customer’s viewpoint
Keeping tabs on the perspective of an evolving student body is a daunting challenge when attacking it with conventional methods. When Dining Services chose SatisTrack™ for the backbone of their satisfaction management program, they eradicated the cost and tedium of writing and printing questionnaires, setting up questionnaires for scanning, and all of the problems associated with the way things were done before. Additionally, the analysis from SatisTrack™ evaluates a number of factors on a continuous basis, including: 1) overall customer satisfaction 2) the drivers of satisfaction, such as customer expectations, and perceived overall quality, and 3) the link between satisfaction and future behaviors, such as customer loyalty and customer retention. This continuous data collection and analysis allows Rutgers to be one step ahead of their ever-changing student needs. In this case, Insights Research Group provided a manageable way to collect, process, and evaluate all of the results from student questionnaires, thereby advancing Dining Services existing capabilities, and enabled them to exceed the expectations of the students.

Illustrated students’ decision process
and perceptions of dining options
Dining Services staff used the results from SatisTrack™ to identify problems and make appropriate improvements in their service. SatisTrack™ provides a gap analysis between satisfaction and “needs improvement” scores, and an improvement index in order to optimize the improvement efforts of the department. The index provides detailed information about each service category of operations management. By correlating overall satisfaction and the performance scores of the individual service categories and factoring in the percent of people who are dissatisfied with the feature, SatisTrack™ provides an index of improvement, which illustrates the most important areas of concentration. In this case, many students noted that they didn't like the menu variety. Through SatisTrack™, Dining Services identified this as a common complaint, and used the information from the Improvement Index to correct the situation. Dining Services was able to see that the problem lied in a lack of healthy selections on the menu and knew from the actual comments of the customers what must be added to remedy the situation.
The analysis of student feedback has become increasingly important at Rutgers. SatisTrack™ led Rutgers Dining Services through a successful re-engineering of their dining programs and allows for continuous improvement of the plan. SatisTrack™ proved to be far less expensive, faster, and more flexible than traditional data collection and processing methods. Capitalizing on the operational expertise of Insights Research Group, Rutgers Dining Services has been able to keep satisfaction scores at a high level that would have been difficult to achieve without such a complete source of dynamic, up to date information.