Monitoring Customer Satisfaction by Innovative Statistical Methods and Models with Application to Tourists' Opinions

Monitoring quality of tourists' opinions is becoming an important issue also for companies providing sport services. The aim in this paper is to apply a new class of models (specifically an extension of CUB models according to Piccolo 2003) and nonparametric permutation methods (according to Pesarin and Salmaso 2010) to a large customer satisfaction survey performed during the winter season 2011-12 on services provided by the ski schools of Alto Adige (Italy). Specifically the parents of young children under the age of 13, who participated in ski courses organized in the Ski Schools, were asked to answer a questionnaire to express their level of satisfaction about some aspects of the service. The data processing is mainly aimed to two goals: 1. To calculate a global index of quality, as synthesis of the customer satisfaction for the various evaluated aspects; 2. To estimate the degree of feeling toward the service and the degree of uncertainty of the respondents and to detect if and how the personal characteristics of the customers can affect these two psychological components, according to the idea that customer satisfaction can measure the perceived quality of the service.