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ABSTRACT
This research investigates the question: Does the physical environment of service delivery settings influence customers' evaluations of the service experience and subsequent behavioral intentions? Theoretical and empirical data from environmental psychology suggests that customer reactions to the tangible physical environment may be more emotional than cognitive, particularly when involving hedonic consumption. This article integrates environmental psychology into SERVQUAL (a current measure of service quality) to enable a fuller assessment of the role of the tangible aspects of service delivery. Based on consumer surveys in three leisure service settings, the findings are that the tangible physical environment plays an important role in generating excitement in leisure settings; excitement, in turn, plays a significant role in determining customers repatronage intentions and willingness to recommend. (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Services managers must balance a complex set of multiple processes and inputs that may have uncertain outputs. In the short term, service managers may focus variable resources on recruiting, selecting, training, compensating, motivating, and monitoring service personnel in hopes of producing superior service quality. The daily pressures of delivering the intangibles may lead service managers to overlook or forego longterm fixed investments in more tangible aspects of service quality, such as relocation or renovation of the physical facilities. Making a significant change in the physical environment is likely to represent a sizeable fixed investment that must be recouped through increased customer traffic. However, are customers more likely to reward those businesses that offer their services in more attractive physical facilities?
Unfortunately, there is not enough guidance to know whether or not the physical environment really matters to service customers. A cursory review of previous service-quality research might lead one to conclude that the tangible physical environment is relatively unimportant. Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry (1991) reported that the tangible service environment had no effect on customers' overall quality perceptions of a telephone company, two insurance companies, and two banks. Similarly, Cronin and Taylor (1992) found that the tangible aspects of the service environment had no effect on customers' quality perceptions of pest control and dry-cleaning services, and had only limited influence on quality perceptions for banks and fast-food restaurants. Dabholkar, Thorpe, and Rentz (1996), on the other hand, found that the tangible aspects of department...