Professor Margareta Friman speaks in a video "Quality. The object of desire" about perceived or objective quality and its relation to satisfaction.

Quality is performance related to some kind of relevant standard. It doesn´t require any experience of consumption. It is primarily cognitive and has fewer conceptual antecedents compared to satisfaction. It also has a durability and a signal of excellence
Satisfaction is a short term fenomen that is based on experience. It has many dimensions and is based on cognitive and affective response.
Quality and satisfaction can be experienced at the same time; you can have a satisfying experience in a high quality business.

I like when my costumers are satisfied with our service. But we have vague ideas about why they actually are satisfied or not.
We have done a lot of work defining the signs of our core values. These values are related to our service - how we behave, create value, lead ourselves and collaborate with our costumers.
When our service is measured, we are rated high related to this.
But our index for efficiency, which we actually have not made that explicit standards for, is much lower, especially from our new costumers. Not a coincidence, I think.

New costumers expectations are unknown for us. But if we manage to improve our quality and give excellent service, we can influence and enhance the expectations of our service. Professor Pedersen says in his video that expectations has a dominant effect of your evaluation, especially when the product (our service) is hard to evaluate.

Finally. Just playing with words, the difference between "good" or "skilful" might just be a bit similar to satisfaction or high quality. When I´m good, I just do my best. That is satisfying but a bit chancy, But when I´m skilful, I know what the best standard is and I do that.

Have to go now... Must work with our standars for efficiency. ;)

Sorry, you who don´t speak Swedish, but this is an interesting article from Svenska Dagbladet about teachers expectations on students. Your find it here

Just a few quotes (my translation, maybe at bit poor...):
"To enduringly enhance the quality of the university collage, we must enhance our expectations and the responsibility of the students, doctoral students and faculty."

"As teachers, we find that when we enhance our expectations, the students will perform better"

This article is interesting for me in many ways, but to choose only one focus, I think of one link in our process with my restauteurs. They are interacting with my administrators, eg when they have to account for how they finance the purchase of their restaurant. We have low expectations on our costumers considering this, and they often respond inadequate to our demands.
This is a serious problem, as it lengthens the investigation  and the costs for our clients as they can´t start their business selling alcohol until they have our sanction.

So what if we enhance our demands on our clients (more probably: on ourselves)? This might be one way to achieve higher satisfaction for our costumers.

Improving service for new costumers?

As I wrote in my second blog post, I work as a head of a municipal unit that investigates and supervise restaurants that sell or would like to sell alcohol. The restaurateurs are our "visible" client, but, as Professor Friman said during her first webinar, we have many other kinds of costumers:  a vertical line from the restaurant-owner to the politicians, the industry and commerce and finally the public, whose health we are ment to protect with the alcohol-law. The system has a built-in conflict with many different aims depending on what focus you have .

Anyhow: we measure our restaurant-owners satisfaction with our service.  The others  -  the politicians, our supervisors and sometimes the public - tell us what they think about our work.
The restaurateurs are asked about their experience of our treatment, our legal security, our fees and our efficiency. We rate high on almost everything apart from efficiency. Here, our new costumers find us more inefficient. We don´t know their expectations about our service, as we never measure that.
Our returning costumers are more satisfied, they rate our efficiency higher.

It has been hard work changing the restaurateurs opinion about our work and we still have a way to go.
According to Professor Friman, Professor Pedersen and the article by Richard L. Oliver (A cognitive model of the antecedents and consequences of satisfaction decisions), there must be a major disconfirmation to change the costumer experience if it is different compared to his expectations.

Probably, our returning costumers, have different expectation from when they first contacted us.
We need to change our new costumers experience of our service. I do agree that we have to improve our efficiency, but how do we work with their expectations of our service?

I hope that this course will give me tools to understand this better.