Customer satisfaction is an evaluative judgment of varying type/quality and intensity that a product/service itself, or a feature of it, does fulfill expectations. Accordingly, customer satisfaction is a consumption-related fulfillmentresponse ranging between levels of perfect fulfillment and overfulfillment. Typical manifestations of customer satisfaction are pleasure, delight, contentment, and relief. Under-fulfillment of expectations is believed to cause customer dissatisfaction. Formation of customer (dis)satisfaction requires at least a minimum amount of direct experience with a product/service.
An overview of other less frequently used conceptual definitions of customer satisfaction than the one referred to here (Oliver, 2010) can be found in Giese and Cote (2000).
Historically, customer satisfaction research is strongly tied to the expectancy.
