Research Outreach

Customer experience of product quality: a new metric

Product quality has long been recognized as a key factor in driving business performance and achieving competitive advantage. But what do we really mean by product quality and how should it be measured?

Professor of Marketing Marcel Paulssen and Research Assistant Dr. Ramesh Roshan Das Guru from the Geneva School of Economics and Management, have developed a multi-dimensional scale called the ‘Customer Experienced Product Quality’ (CEPQ) scale, which identifies and measures how customers experience and respond to the quality of products. They have tested the validity and reliability of the CEPQ metric across diverse product categories.

Prof. Paulssen and Dr. Das Guru have found that their CEPQ metric is more sophisticated in its insights when compared to alternative quality metrics, such as those used by online shopping platforms. By drilling down and revealing how the quality dimensions relate to each other, the CEPQ metric provides a more comprehensive and diagnostic insight into how product quality is experienced in a category. Their research shows that CEPQ is a better predictor of customer behavior than other established metrics such as customer satisfaction.

They suggest that measuring and tracking CEPQ on a regular basis can help companies and the insights generated can help to both improve production processes and inform new product development. It can also enable operations managers and product managers to focus on critical product quality dimensions and thus allocate resources more effectively for improving the quality of their products.

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