Inits rise to prominence, the customer satisfaction arena has generated a rich and complex web of jargon: customer value, service quality, total quality management, gap analysis, factor analysis, radar charts - the list goes on.

Making sense of it all can be confusing to say the least. Chuck Chakrapani is here to help with his new book, How to Measure Service Quality & Customer Satisfaction – The Informal Field Guide for Tools and Techniques. Chakrapani, president of Standard Research Systems in Toronto, has written a number of research-related books and articles and is currently editor-in-chief of the Canadian Journal of Marketing Research.

Obviously a man with a lot of real-world research experience, he stines in the preface that the book was written to " ...provide immediate help to the harried manager and researcher, or the academic, who must find a suitable technique for a given problem and understand what it does and how. In a hurry. On a late Friday afternoon."

To that end, he succeeds admirably. In the course of taking the reader on a trek through the many steps of a quality/satisfaction measurement program, the book gives quick-hit examples and explanations of a host of techniques and terms. You won't find in-depth discussions here; rather, Chakrapani gives the reader a basic understanding and in most cases provides a list of books containing more information on a specific topic. Also helpful is a quick-reference list that matches service-related questions (e.g., How do customers see us?) with suggested analysis techniques and the corresponding chapter in which Chakrapani explains them.

The core of the book explores what he calls the P3D3 matrix, which is made up of the three P's of measuring service quality (producers, processes and people) and the three D's (diagnosing, detailing and delivering). From chapter 10 to 19, Chakrapani focuses on one matrix cell at a time, and the methods...