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Kenneth E. Clow: Assistant Professor of Marketing, Gladys A. Kelce School of Business, Pittsburg State University, Kansas, USA
David L. Kurtz: Head of the Department of Marketing and Transportation, College of Business Administration, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA
John Ozment: Department of Marketing and Transportation, College of Business Administration, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA
Beng Soo Ong: Department of Marketing and Logistics, School of Business and Administrative Sciences, Calofirnia State University, Fresno, California, USA
Introduction
The most common operational definition of service quality in the services marketing literature is that it is the difference between the expectations a consumer had prior to a service encounter and the perceptions of the service received (Gronroos, 1982; Lewis and Booms, 1983; Parasuraman et al., 1985; Smith and Houston, 1982). This definition is based primarily on disconfirmation theory, which states that consumers are satisfied with a service experience if the service experience meets or exceeds their expectations (Bitner, 1990; Bolton and Drew, 1991a; Carman, 1990; Gronroos, 1990). Consumer expectations, therefore, serve as the cornerstone or foundation on which service quality is measured. A theoretical, conceptual and operational understanding of consumer expectations therefore becomes critical in the analysis of service quality provided by service firms.
Through the use of exploratory focus groups, Zeithaml et al. (1993) identified major antecedents of consumer expectations of services. Seventeen research propositions were proposed. In their concluding remarks, they suggested future research should empirically examine the suggested relationships. This research is an initial first step in that direction. Because of the complexity of their model, this study focussed only on the antecedents of predicted service.
Gronroos (1982, 1984, 1990) has theorized that service quality evaluations and consumer expectations of services are filtered through the image consumers have of a service firm. Gronroos's model suggests that if consumers had a positive image of a service firm, one unsatisfactory service experience would have less impact on the consumer's evaluation of the service than if the consumer had a negative or low image of the firm prior to the service experience. Firm image was not included by Zeithaml et al. (1993) in their model as an antecedent of consumer expectations of services. Thus, this research addressed the following questions:
- (1) How much impact do each...