Total customer satisfaction is a goal toward which any service or product provider, including pavement engineers, should strive. In order to do this, the customers for pavements must be well identified as well as the measures to be used for judging their satisfaction. This paper defines the key sets of pavement customers in relation to the different classes of pavements, including roads, off-road areas, airfields and railbeds. It then addresses the means by which customers can be served in a broad sense by effective pavement management. Next, some possible measures of customer satisfaction are identified ranging from ride quality to surface distress, structural adequacy, surface friction, surface drainage, noise, user delays and life-cycle cost-effectiveness. As well, the degree of importance for different customer-measure combinations is suggested. A brief description of the technologies available for characterizing the measures is provided, together with some examples. Finally, the results of a simple pilot study to determine the relative value of the measures of road user customer satisfaction are described. These suggest that on a scale of 0 to 100, ride quality would contribute about 25% to overall customer satisfaction, surface distress nearly 20% and all the other measures between about 5 and 10% each. (A)
Abstract