Classifying and clustering construction projects by customer satisfaction

Purpose - Construction is often a long-term project described as a dynamic and complex entity. This is one of the factors making the assessment of construction quality so difficult. The actors in the field of construction need versatile and systematic data about the quality of the construction process and the building in order to be able to operate in a customer-oriented manner and develop their own operations. The purpose of this paper is to examine the typical factors in a construction project as regards customer satisfaction. Design/methodology/approach - The cluster analysis differentiating between projects in this paper is conducted with a total of 831 construction projects. Findings - The paper reveals seven similar but nevertheless different clusters. What the best clusters as regards customer satisfaction has in common is that the management's professional skills and the cooperation methods are successful when compared to other areas of the cluster. Additionally, good cooperation methods predict good level of customer satisfaction. In all clusters, handover inspections has the lowest level of success. When examining various, good and poor projects, it may be stated that the same factors were successful in all of the projects. Originality/value - Improving the quality of construction projects from the customer's perspective has gained growing interest also in construction industry. Indeed, information about the project's success factors from the customer's perspective is needed in the construction business. Owing to the complex nature of construction and the special characteristics of project production, construction has had several problems in producing quality in a customer-oriented manner. This paper describes, the success factors from the viewpoint of customer satisfaction. Construction has become a service industry adopting methods from the field of service management but the use of soft measurement tools, such as customer satisfaction, is still at an early stage of development.