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Purchasing's Interaction with Customers: The Effects on Customer Satisfaction—A Case Study
Author(s) -
Rossler Paul E.,
Hirsz A.B.
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
international journal of purchasing and materials management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.75
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 1745-493X
pISSN - 1055-6001
DOI - 10.1111/j.1745-493x.1996.tb00218.x
Subject(s) - purchasing , business , customer satisfaction , marketing , customer retention , division (mathematics) , customer delight , perception , customer advocacy , service quality , psychology , arithmetic , mathematics , neuroscience , service (business)
A significant number of purchasing organizations find themselves working to improve both their image and customer satisfaction. This article describes the experiences of a purchasing organization, in one division of an oil company, that had tried unsuccessfully for ten years to improve customer satisfaction by measuring performance and improving supplier reliability. Management then employed a somewhat broader approach to improving purchasing performance in the area of capital equipment purchases: interacting more closely with internal customers. To evaluate the effects of this approach on customer satisfaction, upper‐ and middle‐level managers in purchasing's two largest internal customer organizations, Engineering and Maintenance, were surveyed—first in the Northern Division, where both past efforts and the current intervention had been implemented, and in a similar division, the Southern Division, where only past efforts had been applied. The results indicate that interacting more closely with customers can improve customer perceptions of purchasing's responsiveness and professionalism, but that technical knowledge may play a greater role in improving perceptions of the value added by purchasing. The experiences of this purchasing organization provide general insights on approaches to perceived performance improvement.