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An executive summary for managers and executive readers can be found at the end of this article
Keywords Service operations, Customer satisfaction, Perception, Consumer attitudes
Abstract Looks at unmet customer expectations in service delivery associated with service encounter problems. Problematic service encounters are compared to those which were problem free. Four services were evaluated by customers - legal consultation, hair stylist, film processing and retail store. These services covered a range of both process and outcome tangibility. Expectations, perceptions and the "gaps" between them were used to evaluate service quality across a range of service encounters. If problems were reported, customers were asked to evaluate three attribution factors: who was at fault for the problem, could it have been prevented and could it occur in future service encounters. These findings indicate that when there is a service encounter problem, and that service has some level of intangibility, unmet customer expectations are significantly greater than in services with some level of tangibility. Suggests how service providers might prevent customer perceptions of service quality from significantly diverging from customer expectations in these situations.
Literature review
Major concern of marketers
Consumption experiences that result in problems for the consumer have been a major concern of marketers because of the potential impact they may have on company profits. Not only can the company lose customers, but also its reputation can be damaged from negative word-of-mouth in the marketplace (Richins, 1983). A major problem for companies is that up to two-thirds of consumers do not report their dissatisfaction (Andreason, 1984; Krishnan and Valle, 1979; Zaltman et al., 1978). Without the complaints, valuable feedback is lost and the company is denied the opportunity to remedy the problem (Fornell and Wernerfelt, 1987; Hirschman, 1970).
A great deal of research in consumer complaint behavior has examined the differences between complaining and non-complaining consumers. Representative research of individual factors include personality factors (Fornell and Wernerfelt, 1987), attitudes toward complaining (Zaltman, et al., 1978) and personal values (Rogers and Williams, 1990). Representative research of situational factors and product-related factors include the importance of the good to the consumer (Bearden and Oliver, 1985), consumer experience (Singh, 1988) and the attribution of blame (Folkes, 1984; Richins, 1983; Krishnan and Valle, 1979).
In services, the...