2. Evaluate Ford’s decision to change to what is essentially a single global methodology for data collection, a CATI system. Many of the major automotive manufacturers have developed a series of market research tracking programs that measure and report customer perceptions concerning price, financing options, brand, style, customer treatment during the sales and service process, and product quality. Of these critical characteristics, product quality remains among the top issues in terms of customer importance and is a major driver of customer satisfaction. Customers repeatedly identify product quality as a ‘must have,’ and can become quite rapidly unsatisfied when their expectations are not met.

Things Gone Wrong (TGW), the major metric of automotive quality research, impacts customer satisfaction in a negative linear relationship.

Therefore, the automobile manufacturers perceive it to be in their long-term interests, if not their survival, to continuously identify quality problems and defects early in the ownership cycle. Their objective is to develop ‘fixes’ for erroneous manufacturing and production processes quickly to stem any customer satisfaction erosion due to product quality defects or variability.

Many of the major automotive manufacturers have launched product quality market research tracking programs on a global scale to aid in the collection, analysis, and comprehension of customer feedback on their product quality. This information provides critical dynamic ‘report card’-level diagnostics of the manufacturing and production processes for the manufacturers.

From this customer information fixes and adjustments are made to the automobile manufacturing and production processes where product quality defects are identified.