"The Effect of Product Knowledge on Customer Satisfaction : For Automobiles"

Lee, Jae Moon (Department of Business Administration, Graduate School of Seoul National University)

Customer Satisfaction is a very useful concept as a tool of evaluating product's quality or firm's performance. This concept emphasizes delivering satisfaction to customers and obtaining profits in return, and as a result, the overall quality of life is expected to be enhanced. The realization of its importance has led to a proliferation of research on the determinants of customer satisfaction over the past two decades. Especially, to provide a basical framework to understand the antecedents of customer satisfaction, a lot of research were attempted in many ways.

Most of this empirical research has come the confirmation/ disconfirmation paradigm, but this paradigm has some limitations. That is, ⑴ there's no consensus about the direct effect of 'expectation' and 'product performance'. ⑵ A lack of researches on durable goods. ⑶ The negligence of consumer variables.

This article has investigated the moderating role of product knowledge in the process of customer satisfaction formation. Customer satisfaction was defined in this article as "the consumer's evaluative process on perceived disconfirmation between prior expectation and the actual performance of product as perceived after its consumption". In order to prove this, all the path(effect) of the variables on satisfaction has been estimated by LISREL program. It is found that there is no direct effect of expectation on satisfaction, but consumers with low product knowledge are likely to have this effect. On the other hand, there is a direct effect of product performance on satisfaction, and this tendency is stronger in consumers with high knowledge.

Conclusively, automobiles(high involvement products; experience goods; durable) have a strong effect of perceived product performance in the process of customer satisfaction formation, so product performance should be treated as an important predictive independent variable.