The most popular and oft-repeated quote of Peter Drucker on Customer is “  To satisfy the customer is the mission and purpose of every business. “  Of course the satisfaction of a customer appears to be the goal and aim of any business.  In fact, it does not require an expert to emphasise satisfaction of the customer for any business; both the most literate and least literate know fully well that customer is essential for a business to sustain and retaining a customer is possible only if the customer is satisfied. So, the major idea is not at all difficult to grasp. But the disturbing words are ‘satisfaction’’ mission and purpose ‘

Satisfaction is a human factor. And the very experience of satisfaction is though easily possible for all difficult to understand. Some questions keep popping up when discussing satisfaction.  Every business enterprise, small or big, knows for certain that there is some percentage of exit customers for any business. Let us not go into business concerns like acquisition of new customers, retention of customers and the exit customers and the different levels of cost involved in each segment of customer relationship. Do you think there is something called full satisfaction.? Of course you might have heard people saying ‘ I am fully satisfied with it’.  I can understand a pocket is full with coins; because ‘full’ seems to refer to quantity more than quality. Can a feeling be  quantified? Not at all possible. Why you are bored with someone who  appealed to you so much earlier that you thought there could be no substitute for him or her?. Satisfaction requires , rather follows fulfilment of a need and need again is very often a feeling-toned experience. Need by nature is competitive; it grows; it may temporarily fade or diminish in intensity but it rises again. Need never dies but goes on to take on many forms mild or wild. All that is being driver here is satisfaction is not that simple as people take it to be in the passing.  Then, the question arises, is the expert wrong in using the word satisfaction while talking about customer. No. he is underscoring a fundamental business concern.  We will see more of it in our next.