Correspondence: Ronald Wright, Department of Business Administration Le Moyne College Syracuse, NY 13214, USA Tel: +1 315 445 4370; Fax: +1 315 445 4787; e-mail: wright@lemoyne.edu

¹is Professor of Management Science at Le Moyne College. She earned her PhD from the University of Florida. She has extensive experience as a consultant, author, and editor. She has published numerous articles in the field of fuzzy logic and fuzzy-rule-based systems and is a recognised authority in management science education. She is currently the Editor-in Chief of INFORMS Transactions in Education.

²is Associate Professor of Marketing and Chair of the Business Administration Department at Le Moyne College. He earned his PhD in Marketing from the University of Massachusetts. He is a frequent editor and program chair for the Academy of Business Administration.

³is Professor of Management Science at Le Moyne College. He earned his PhD from the University of Kentucky. He has over 25 years of experience as a management consultant and has published over 50 papers, most relating to the development and use of decision support systems.

Received 7 March 2008; Revised 7 March 2008; Published online 12 May 2008.

Abstract

Customer satisfaction is an important goal for providers of both services and products, and customer surveys are a commonly used instrument for evaluating that satisfaction. A number of analytical tools are available to assist in the analysis of these surveys. However, under a variety of circumstances, each of these tools has limitations that could seriously restrict their value to marketing managers. This paper describes an innovative approach based on the use of fuzzy-rule-based systems and includes an illustration of the use of the methodology to analyse a customer satisfaction survey conducted by the corporate information division of a major US electric utility.