Content area
Full Text
Interdisciplinary Insights on Service Activities
Edited by Professor Sylvie Llosa, Professor Chiara Orsingher
Over the years, marketing researchers have reached consensuses on several issues related to the domain of services. First, as the economy has become mostly service-based, researchers now consider the marketing discipline as being service dominated. Consumers in OECD countries spend more on services than for tangible goods ([37] Martin, 1999). Indeed, service activities constitute about 70 percent of [41] OECD (2005) countries GDP, and this trend is expected to continue in the coming decade. The globalization of services marketing has presented both academics and practitioners challenges and opportunities in this area ([31] Javalgi et al. , 2006). Reflecting this changing emphasis services marketing has become a well established field of academic inquiry and now represents an alternative paradigm to the marketing of goods ([36] Lovelock and Gummesson, 2004).
Researchers also agree that a central topic in service research is service quality (SQ), which is a critical determinant of business performance as well as firms' long-term viability ([6] Bolton and Drew, 1991; [22] Gale, 1994). This is because SQ leads to customer satisfaction which in turn has a positive impact on customer word-of-mouth, attitudinal loyalty, and purchase intentions ([23] Gremler and Gwinner, 2000). The view that SQ results from customers' evaluation of the service encounter prevails in the literature ([15] Cronin and Taylor, 1992; [43] Parasuraman et al. , 1985). Under this perspective, researchers further agree that SQ is best represented as an aggregate of the discrete elements from the service encounter such as reliability, responsiveness, competence, access, courtesy, communication, credibility, security, understanding, and tangible elements of the service offer ([15] Cronin and Taylor, 1992; [18] Dabholkar et al. , 2000; [43] Parasuraman et al. , 1985).
On the other hand, the question of the operationalization of SQ has continued to evoke discussion. This discussion has been primarily centered on two important issues. The first relates to the debate of whether SERVQUAL or SERVPERF should be used for measuring SQ ([17] Cui et al. , 2003; [27] Hudson et al. , 2004; [29] Jain and Gupta, 2004; [32] Kettinger and Lee, 1997; [40] Mukherje and Nath, 2005; [47] Quester and Romaniuk, 1997). SERVQUAL, grounded in the Gap model, measures SQ as the...