Customer Orientation of the Company

What it measures

A six-item scale measuring the degree to which a consumer perceives a company as genuinely oriented toward understanding and fulfilling customer needs rather than pursuing purely transactional or self-serving goals. Items span goal-facilitation, best-interest orientation, need assessment, product fit to needs, open communication about needs, and reliable responsiveness to needs. The scale operationalises customer orientation at the company level — the organisational-level counterpart to salesperson-level customer orientation scales.

Response format

7-point Likert

Scale items

• This company tries to help customers achieve their goals.
• This company has the customers' best interest in mind.
• This company tries to figure out what its customers' needs are.
• This company tries to find out what kind of products would be most helpful for a customer.
• This company tries to get customers to discuss their needs with them.
• Customers can count on this company to take action to address customers' needs.

Full scale items shown. Always cite the original source when using this scale in research.

Usage notes & scoring

Single alpha: α = .93 — Song, Jung & Xu (2021, Study 3; n = 453 MTurk). VALIDITY: Not reported. Traceable through Dahl, Fuchs & Schreier (2015) and at least to Brown et al. (1994) SOCO framework. Companion to Customer Orientation of the Salesperson (COSP, ID 2061) — both measure customer orientation but at different levels of analysis (company vs. individual salesperson).

Recommended companion scales

Citation

Dahl, Darren W., Christoph Fuchs, and Martin Schreier (2015). Why and when consumers prefer products of user-designed product lines. Journal of Marketing, 79(1), 65–78. [Applied by: Song, Ruixue, Jihye Jung, and Yingjiao Xu (2021). Journal of Retailing, 97(1), 161–175.]

Keywords