Factors affecting customer satisfaction in fast-food restaurant using fuzzy AHP : companies perspective / Nur Aqilah Hassan

The fast-food restaurant has become a popular type of restaurant in the current day. The expansion of the fast-food industry rapidly changes according to the demands of the customers to satisfy their needs. Thus, customers have many choices in terms of different kinds of fast-food restaurants to satisfy themselves. Customers’ satisfaction with the restaurants will influence not only the image but also the services provided by the staff of said fast-food eateries as they seek to entertain and give the best possible service to their paying customers. However, the competition between the restaurants has caused certain restaurants to gain lower profits as the customers’ satisfaction is not fulfilled for certain factors. The factors are price, quality of food, quality of service, the atmosphere of the restaurant, promotion, customer expectation, and brand. This study was conducted to analyze the importance of factors in customer satisfaction in a fast-food restaurant in Perlis. In this study, the method applied is the Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to rank the factors that have a high impact on customer satisfaction. The selected fast-food restaurants were McDonald (McD), Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), Pizza Hut, Domino’s Pizza, Marrybrown, and Subway. The primary data collected through the questionnaire were analyzed by experts, the manager of the fast-food restaurant selected. The findings show that in a fast-food restaurant, the quality of service with 0.2188 of normalized weight is the most important factor in customer satisfaction, and the price with 0.0436 of normalized weight is the least significant. The role of the manager and the staffs were thus evidently more important in customer satisfaction than the price offered.