Quality is the most important characteristics of services. Therefore, in this study, using a survey by Japan Productivity Center on customer satisfaction, we examine which types of firms tend to provide higher-quality services. Our empirical analysis suggests the following three features with respect to the association between firms’ attributes and service quality. First, firms holding greater amounts of liquid assets tend to provide high-quality services, implying that customer satisfaction is associated with the accumulation intangible, manageable assets. Second, older firms tend to provide high-quality services, suggesting that the accumulation of business experiences leads to high-quality services. Third, while we confirm that firms exhibiting substantially high productivity tend to obtain high customer satisfaction, we also find that firms with seemingly low productivity attain high customer-satisfaction. Such a non-linear relation between productivity and customer satisfaction depends on industry characteristics.
