Abstract
According to the World Competitiveness Report: 1999, South Africa ranks poorly in terms of delivering customer services (Garelli, 1999). In order to assist South African organisations to identify their customers' value preferences, three scales collectively called the Customer Preference Questionnaire (CPQ) were developed. The purpose was to assess the three value disciplines as conceptualised by Treacy and Wiersema (1993; 1995a; 1995b) by empirically evaluating the CPQ and determining the psychometrical properties of the various identified scales. A combined sample (N = 436), consisting of undergraduate (N = 281) and post-graduate (N = 155) students in the field of human resource management, were asked to assess the university from a customer's point of view. All three scales were subjected to factor analysis and iterative item analysis. The three scales yielded acceptable alpha coefficients, indicating that customers' preferences could be measured reliably. The implications of these findings are discussed.