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Jim Walker: Assistant Professor of Marketing, Department of Marketing/Management, Northwest Missouri State University, Maryville, Missouri, USA
Julie Baker: Associate Professor of Marketing, Department of Marketing, University of Texas at Arlington, Texas, USA
Introduction
Understanding what consumers expect from a service organization is necessary for service managers, because expectations provide a standard of comparison against which consumers judge an organization's performance. As partial evidence of the importance of expectations, one evaluation segment of the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award is a firm's ability to understand their customers' expectations (Gale, 1994).
Measuring service quality
Parasuraman et al. (1985), whose research has provided a well-known framework for measuring service quality, define service quality as the gap between consumers' expectations and their perceptions of how the service is performed. These authors' early work relied upon a single expectation standard, desired expectations (i.e. what a consumer feels a service provider should offer), as a comparison against which service performance is assessed. More recently, researchers have suggested that multi-expectation standard approaches may be more appropriate in service quality models (Boulding et al., 1993; Zeithaml et al., 1993; Parasuraman et al., 1994b).
Similarly, research on customer satisfaction proposes that consumer judgments result from a comparison of expectations and perceptions of performance and traditionally has also relied primarily upon a single expectation standard, predicted expectations (i.e. what consumers predict or think will occur) (Swan and Trawick, 1980; Oliver, 1981; Zeithaml et al., 1993). However, several other types of satisfaction standards, including multi-expectation standards, have been investigated (e.g. Oliver, 1985; Forbes et al., 1986; Wilton and Nicosia, 1986; Tse and Wilton, 1988; Spreng and Olshavsky, 1993). Tse and Wilton (1988) suggest that a single expectation standard model fails to adequately capture the underlying processes of customer satisfaction.
With growing attention on the need for examining multi-expectation standards, a framework was recently proposed that integrates both the service quality and satisfaction perspectives of expectations. This framework combines adequate, desired, and predicted expectations, along with perceived performance, into a single encompassing model (Zeithaml et al., 1993). By separating expectations into an adequate standard (which is influenced by predicted expectations) and a desired standard, the model offers a richer measure of service quality, along with an intriguing concept called the "zone of tolerance." The zone of...