UIC 252:2002-10

The importance attached to customer satisfaction analyses in both scientific theory and practice has grown in recent years and continues to grow, with customer satisfaction being seen as one of the central drivers of business performance. Satisfied customers are loyal customers that will continue to buy services from the company and even recommend it to others - correlations that have been proven through numerous empirical studies. A further reason for the increasing focus on customer satisfaction as a topic is linked to the key importance of service quality as a competitive advantage, with service-providers in particular increasingly tending to have their services certified by independent institutions. A key role is played in this connection by the ISO 9000 group of standards published by the International Organisation for Standardisation. The ISO 9000 ff. standards set out a series of requirements to be met by quality management systems and stipulate, on the matter of customer satisfaction measurement, that a company should regularly monitor its customers' perception of the standard of quality offered. The methods by which customers' views are ascertained must also be clearly defined. In this respect, measuring customer satisfaction is essential to railway freight operators in order to conform to the ISO 9000 ff. standards. What is crucial in this regard is for customer perceptions of service quality to be regularly recorded. In corporate practice there is a wide range of supplier-oriented indicators for measuring service quality, such as internal quality indices. Differences between the standard of quality perceived by the customer - expressed as customer satisfaction - and quality from the supplier's perspective should therefore be investigated by the company. In this process, the supplier's own quality indicators should be subject to critical scrutiny, as in a case like this they may not give an adequate picture of quality from the customer point of view, ultimately the most crucial perspective for a company. In this context it is clear that regular measurement of customer satisfaction is also of the utmost importance for railway freight operators. Having said that, carrying out customer satisfaction analyses for a complex service like rail transport is not without its problems. These guidelines therefore offer recommendations for the execution of customer satisfaction measurements in the field of freight transport services. Whilst many of the component parts of this concept are applicable whatever the country - criteria like punctuality or transit time, for example, are universally relevant - the proposed concept also leaves room for adjustments in several areas to accommodate the specific features of countries or companies, as cultural differences may for example dictate. From this point of view, these guidelines by no means seek to legislate or impose a unification of the individual national customer satisfaction surveys, but rather seek to pass on the fruit of scientific research and practical experience in the field of customer satisfaction ('recommendation, not regulation'). The idea is to set out a basic model for the measurement of customer satisfaction that can (and indeed must) then be adapted to the needs of each individual company. Nonetheless it would be beneficial if the recommendations in these guidelines were implemented at least in part by a large number of railway freight companies. By obtaining a standard core in this way, it would be possible to carry out international benchmarking on customer satisfaction in the various countries, an exercise that would bring important insights for both the International Union of Railways and the individual companies.