"Value and satisfaction may be influenced by many factors throughout the customer's overall purchase, ownership, and service experiences. These factors include the organisation's relationship with customers that helps build trust, confidence, and loyalty.

"Customer-driven quality addresses not only the product and service characteristics that meet basic customer requirements, but also includes those features and characteristics that differentiate products and services from competing offerings. Such differentiation may be based upon new or modified offerings, combinations of product and service offerings, customization of offerings, rapid response, or special relationships.

"Customer-driven quality is thus a strategic concept. It is directed toward customer retention, market share gain, and growth. It demands constant sensitivity to changing and emerging customer and market requirements, and the factors that drive customer satisfaction and retention.

"Customer-driven quality also demands awareness of developments in technology and of competitors' offerings, and rapid and flexible response to customer and market requirements.

"Customer-driven quality means much more than defect and error reduction, merely meeting specifications, or reducing complaints. Nevertheless, defect and error reduction and elimination of causes of dissatisfaction contribute to the customers' view of quality and are thus also important parts of customer-driven quality. In addition, the organisation's success in recovering from defects and mistakes ("making things right for the customer") is crucial to building customer relationships and to customer retention."

A few words on survey methods
This category includes a number of questions that include phrases like ‘Describe how your organisation determines ….’ In many cases the answers will involve asking questions of (that is, surveying) your distributors, customers (internal and external) or other users of your products or services æ about how they use your products, how satisfied they are, what their re-purchase intentions are and so on.

Surveying customers is a common and often poorly designed activity. In a 1998 paper that every survey designer should read, Ken Miller asks ‘Are your surveys only suitable for wrapping fish?’ His answer æ in brief, and in many cases, yes.

As Ken Miller writes, "The popularity of surveys is on the rise. You can't go anywhere without being asked to complete one. They are in every hotel room and restaurant and on every airplane."

Miller identifies the following common problems with customer surveys:

• The wrong people are surveyed
• The wrong questions are asked
• The questions are asked the wrong way
• The questions are asked at the wrong time
• Satisfaction and dissatisfaction are assumed to be equally important
• Those who did not buy or use the product/service are not surveyed
• Surveys are conducted for the wrong reasons
• The results are generalised to groups not surveyed
• Surveys are used as a substitute for better methods
• The results do not direct improvement actions.

For an extended summary of Miller’s paper, and some examples, see the exhibit on Survey methods.