Paper Title
FQSCO: A Flexible Model For Measuring Customer Satisfaction On Software Based Products And Service

Abstract
Many software products and services deployed in user environments at times fail to meet user needs satisfactorily. This may be due to the fact that the product or service failed to meet user requirements from the outset (inception) of the Information Systems (IS) project. This study proposes a Flexible Qualifier Weighted Customer Opinion with Safeguard Estimates (FQWCOS) model for measuring the satisfaction of users of software products and services. The FQWCOS model is a variant of the Qualifications Weighted Customer Opinion with Safeguard questions (QWCOS). The FQWCOS model was verified with empirical data using samples from 40 users of ASAS software product. Descriptive statistics were also used to obtain the frequencies, mean values, relative frequencies, standard error, and standard deviation. From these values, it was possible to compute the normalized score of customer opinion Oi and the external measures E for QWCOS and Ei (i=1-4) for FQWCOS were computed. Results from the study reveal that there was no difference between the external measures for QWCOS and FQWCOS. However, the result suggest that external measures were higher when standard error (SE) was used to obtain the measures at different levels 31.58, 19.79, 21.76, 35.69 and 31.06 than when external measure was computed using standard deviation (STD) which yielded the values 4.99, 3.13, 3.44, 5.64 and 4.07. We conclude that FQWCOS and QWCOS yield the same values probably due to small sample used. However, FQWCOS provides a flexible and simple approach, and reveals the need to use the standard error instead of standard deviation since this yields higher magnitude values appropriate for expressing external measuresin percentages. Index Terms - Software quality, external measurement, customer satisfaction, flexible model.