Use of Customer Data Analysis in Continuous Quality Improvement of Service Processes

Growth and importance of services are a natural response to wider forces that are creating change in our society. The paradigm shift we have been facing could be described as service revolution. With this paradigm shift, service quality is becoming a critical long-term competitive advantage which companies can obtain with logical and systematic use of statistical methods in continuous quality improvement of service processes, also taking into account recent fast developments of information and telecommunication technology. A so-called integral approach to the use of statistical methods in continuous quality improvement of service processes can be proposed as an alternative to well-known and practically widely applied partial approaches. Based on the possibility to identify individual customers and thus guarantee simultaneous availability of their demographic, socio-economic, transaction and survey data, its theoretical foundations are discussed in this paper along with basic challenges of its practical application.