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The authors argue that perceptions of service quality vary across cultural groups, as defined by each culture's position on Hofstede's dimensions. They explicitly map the relationship between service quality perceptions and cultural dimension positions and draw the implications for international service market segmentation. They also test the hypotheses constituting their theoretical analysis. They show that the importance of SERVQUAL dimensions is correlated with Hofstede's cultural dimensions. They also used the correlation coefficients to compute a Cultural Service Quality Index that could be used to segment international service markets and allocate resources across segments.
In 1994, Anderson and Fornell proposed "a customer satisfaction research prospectus" in the concluding chapter of the book on service quality edited by Rust and Oliver. One of the research questions they suggested was the investigation of systematic variation in satisfaction across nations. More specifically, they asked, "How does culture affect the level of satisfaction?" The answer to this question, they argued, would have important implications on how firms might allocate resources in different parts of the global economy. Since Anderson and Fornell asked their question, the relationship between culture and service quality/satisfaction has received increasing interests as suggested by the recent articles by Winsted (1997), Donthu and Yoo (1998), and Mattila (1999). These studies began to establish the links between cultural dimensions and service quality dimensions by studying a subset of possible relationships. In this article, we provide and test a conceptual link between all five cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede (1980, 1991) and variations in the relative importance of all five service quality dimensions developed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry (1985, 1988; Parasuraman, Berry, and Zeithaml 1991b; Zeithaml, Berry, and Parasuraman 1988, 1993). We also develop a Cultural Service Quality Index (CSQI) that evaluates the relative importance of each SERVQUAL dimension as a function of the five cultural dimensions and that can be used to segment multicultural markets and allocate resources across cultural segments.
In the areas of services marketing and relationships marketing, the concept of service quality plays a central role in understanding customer satisfaction and retention (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry 1985). In this article, we develop and test hypotheses on the influence of cultural factors on perceived service quality. An example of this influence, shown by...