Analyse der Konformitätskosten – dargestellt am Beispiel des Kundenservice eines Versandhandelsunternehmens

In this article an application-oriented approach to analyze the cost of conformance of services, i. e. ‘cost of customer satisfaction’, is presented. Contrary to quality costing methods in manufacturing industries, which are concerned about objective quality standards, services have to cope with the perceived quality and customer expectations. In this context different costs of service quality are portrayed. In addition, benchmarking via Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is described. Based on the DEA method a model to approximate the cost of conformance is developed. The objective is to retrieve the share of activity-based costs necessary to sustain customer satisfaction. The application of the quality costing procedure is illustrated at a customer service unit of a catalog retailer. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2007