Who Provides High Quality Services?: Evidence from the Survey on Customer Satisfaction (Japanese)

Quality is the most important characteristic of services. Using the survey on customer satisfaction conducted by the Japan Productivity Center, we examine what types of firms tend to provide higher quality services. Our empirical analysis suggests the following three features on the association between firm attributes and the quality of services provided by them. First, firms holding larger liquidity assets tend to provide higher quality service, which implies that customer satisfaction is associated with the accumulation of intangible manageable assets. Second, older firms tend to provide higher quality service, which implies that the accumulation of business experiences leads to higher quality service. Third, while we confirm that firms exhibiting substantially high productivity tend to obtain high customer satisfaction, we also find firms with seemingly low productivity also obtain high customer satisfaction. Such a non-linear relationship between productivity and customer satisfaction depends on industry characteristics.