You can't escape it. Everywhere you look - on televi­sion, in newspapers and magazines - people are talk­ing about quality - service quality, product quality, customer satisfaction.

That's great, but what surprises me is that some of them are talking about it as if it were a new concept. It seems to me that quality should be a given for any business that wants to do more than just keep its creditors at bay. It should be Job One.

With quality as their mantra, many firms are busy construct­ing new or refining existing quality programs. Some compa­nies - such as Federal Express and Caterpillar, whose customer satisfaction work is profiled in this issue - have been concerned with quality for years, long before it became a national buzzword. They know that as a supplier of a product or service, you can't define service quality yourself, you have to ask your customers to do it for you. That's where marketing research comes in.

Research plays two critical roles in the service quality pro­cess, first by providing a foundation for construction of cus­tomer satisfaction program, and second by providing a way tomeasure how well the program's goals are being met.

The research industry is spreading the research/service quality gospel (we've joined the chorus this month by adding customer satisfaction/service quality to our list of annual special emphasis issues), and so are folks like Harvey Shycon.

Shycon has been studying service quality and customer satisfaction for 15 years as a part of his work as a director of operations management with Arthur D. Little, a Cambridge, Mass.-based international management and technology consulting firm. In his work with his clients he stresses the importance of finding out what the customer wants.

"Too often, companies define service as they see it. For you or I to sit back, if we were service providers, and decide what services the customer might like real...