An integrated framework based on the ECSI approach to link mould customers' satisfaction and product design

Customer satisfaction (CS) and retention are key issues for organisations in today's competitive market place, making its proper evaluation a main concern for companies. Recently, the European Customer Satisfaction Index (ECSI) has been assumed as a reliable and independent frame-of-reference way of assessing CS. This article describes one framework based on ECSI, which attempts to evaluate the factors that contribute to CS for the Portuguese moulds industry. In order to pursue this goal, an ECSI model, specific for the injection mould industry, was designed and tested. Owing to the characteristics of the gathered data, partial least squares was used to estimate model parameters. The estimated model, which shows validity and reliability, demonstrates an excellent capacity for explaining CS (80.4%), as well as loyalty (58.2%). We also propose an approach to link the ECSI model parameters to the generation and evaluation of design solutions for moulds. This linkage allows us to identify the critical factors for achieving high levels of molds' design quality, through analytical hierarchical process (AHP) ranking, and to determine the impact of mould's design solutions over CS and retention.