CUSTOMER SATISFACTION, ITS EVALUATION BY ENTERPRISES AND PERFORMANCE OF FOOD INDUSTRY ENTERPRISES

Customers' satisfaction is believed to have a positive effect on enterprises' financial performance. For that reason enterprises evaluates customers' satisfaction with their products. However, so far there has not been any study comparing consumers' satisfaction from a perspective of enterprises and from a perspective of consumers themselves. On the basis of questionnaire designed for both enterprises and their customers we discovered that enterprises overrate their customers' satisfaction in all investigated factors. Not only there is a difference in enterprises' self-evaluation of customers' satisfaction and evaluation of customers' satisfaction performed by customers themselves. We proved further that customers' satisfaction evaluated by customers can serve as a predictor of financial performance of enterprises, which is not true for enterprises' self-evaluation. Performing enterprises gained significantly better scores in some factors of satisfaction than non-performing companies.