Craig, N; Sommerville, J and Auchterlounie, T (2010) Customer satisfaction and snagging in the UK private house building sector. In: Egbu, C (ed.) Proceedings of 26th Annual ARCOM Conference, 6-8 September 2010, Leeds, UK.
Abstract
The idea of assessing new home customer satisfaction, under a systematic approach, began in 2000 and the performance of the private house building sector of the UK construction industry has been measured in recent years using seven national customer satisfaction surveys. Recently, the house building sector has begun to emerge from its lowest levels of activity for many years. During this period of low output, the levels of customer satisfaction reported in surveys conducted by the Housing Forum and the House Builders Federation have improved only slightly to 77% (2009) compared to 76% in the previous two years when activity was much higher. During the same period snags reported by customer increased from 94% in 2007 to 95% in 2009 on a 20% smaller sample. Data collected in these surveys demonstrates that only three quarters of customer are happy with their new home and the trend regarding defects being reported by customers appears to be increasing. The authors have also analysed a dataset of 199,000 snagging items the results of which demonstrate the problem of snagging within private house building not only in relation to the Paretto 80/20 concept but also the relationship that snagging plays in terms of technical and functional quality.
| Item Type: | Conference Paper (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | customer satisfaction; defects; housing; quality |
| Index terms: | customer satisfaction, housing, dataset, construction industry, builder, survey |
| Subjects: | practitioner, construction type, data collection methods, service delivery, industry analysis, data management |
| Topics: | Research Practice, Roles and Professions, Stakeholder Management, Construction Technology, Digital Applications |
| Descriptive scope: | 4 PCTE |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here