A Customer Satisfaction Approach for User-oriented Comparative Evalutations of Services

A goal-driven multi-criteria approach to evaluation is proposed to help a potential new client to choose among competing suppliers of a type of service (or product). The actor of evaluation is an independent agency, perhaps a magazine, which interprets the point of view of a type of potential client. Evaluations are grounded on the surveyed perceived satisfaction of old clients, but on the dimensions of interest for a type of potential client accounted for by the criterion he adopts. An approach which uses structured stochastic models is presented, but we emphasize a new interpretation of the role of modeling in evaluations. In the our setup evaluations are fully conditioned on the accounting criterion - even subjective - which the actor of evaluations would adopt as grounds for its evaluations.