30-09-2013, 02:58 PM
A STUDY ON CUSTOMER SATISFACTION IN THE PONDICHERRY CO-OPERATIVE MILK PRODUCER’S UNION LTD PUDUCHERRY
STUDY ON CUSTOMER SATISFACTION.doc (Size: 662 KB / Downloads: 25)
ABSTRACT
The Project has been done in The Pondicherry Co-operative Milk Producer Union Ltd. The title of the project is “Customer Satisfaction in the Pondicherry Co-operative milk Producer’s Union”.
The study starts with an Company’s profile and also the need for study, review of literature and objectives are set out for the study. Research methodology, Data analysis & Interpretation, Findings and Suggestions of the study follow.
One of the main areas of the project is the analysis part, where the data are analyzed & interpreted, to find out the Customer Satisfaction. Some of the tools used in Customer Satisfaction analysis are regarding to:
Percentage Method.
Chi-Square Method.
And then conclusions, limitations & scope for further study were discussed.
ORIGIN AND GROWTH
History tells us that Ponlait came to existence as Pondicherry Milk Supply Society registered as 1st Co-operative Society in the Union Territory of Pondicherry on 07-02-1955. Started in a tiny shed its primary objective and focus was to supply milk to the urban consumers
As time passed the supply society has diversified its activity from consumer to producers, and concentrated in increasing the milk production by giving various assistance / incentives to the milk-producing farmers.
The Union started procuring milk from the village producers on quality basis from 1970 onwards. To keep pace with the milk production, the Milk Union has also set up a Dairy Plant with 10,000 ltrs capacity for processing on 12.04.1971.
During the year 1973 the supply society was converted to co-operative milk producers’ Union with objective of shifting its focus on the milk producing community and its welfare.
MILK PROCESSING
The present handling capacity of the Dairy plant is 50,000 ltrs per day. However with prudent technical manpower and top managements support an average of 80,000 ltrs of milk is handled per day and 93,000 ltrs of milk handled in peak.
3 varieties of milk namely Tonned Milk, Standardised Milk & Premium Milk are produced as per the consumer requirements. The daily consumer demand is met fully. Present demand is 62,000 to 65,000 liters per day.
From the August 2002, the Dairy is supplying 15,000 liters of standardised milk to school children in the morning under Sri Rajiv Gandhi School Children Break fast scheme, 1st of its kind in the nation organized by the government of pondicherry. Besides at present the union is 28,500 liters if milk supplying to the students both in the morning and evening.
MEASURING CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
Organizations are increasingly interested in retaining existing customers while targeting non-customers; measuring customer satisfaction provides an indication of how successful the organization is at providing products and/or services to the marketplace.
Consumer satisfaction is an ambiguous and abstract concept and the actual manifestation of the state of satisfaction will vary from person to person and product/service to product/service. The state of satisfaction depends on a number of both psychological and physical variables which correlate with satisfaction behaviors such as return and recommend rate. The level of satisfaction can also vary depending on other options the customer may have and other products against which the customer can compare the organization's products.
Because satisfaction is basically a psychological state, care should be taken in the effort of quantitative measurement, although a large quantity of research in this area has recently been developed. Work done by Berry, Brodeur between 1990 and 1998 defined ten 'Quality Values' which influence satisfaction behavior, further expanded by Berry in 2002 and known as the ten domains of satisfaction. These ten domains of satisfaction include: Quality, Value, Timeliness, Efficiency, Ease of Access, Environment, Inter-departmental Teamwork, Front line Service Behaviors, Commitment to the Customer and Innovation. These factors are emphasized for continuous improvement and organizational change measurement and are most often utilized to develop the architecture for satisfaction measurement as an integrated model. Work done by Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry between 1985 and 1988 provides the basis for the measurement of customer satisfaction with a service by using the gap between the customer's expectation of performance and their perceived experience of performance. This provides the measurer with a satisfaction "gap" which is objective and quantitative in nature. Work done by Cronin and Taylor propose the "confirmation/disconfirmation" theory of combining the "gap" described by Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry as two different measures (perception and expectation of performance) into a single measurement of performance according to expectation. According to Garbrand, customer satisfaction equals perception of performance divided by expectation of performance.