Relationships and impacts of service quality,perceived value,customer satisfaction,and image: an empirical study

In today's world of intense competition, satisfying customers is only the base line and may not be sufficient for survival. Management should focus on gaining customer loyalty by enhancing customer perceptions of service quality and increasing as perceived by the consumer value. Although previous studies have addressed the importance of service quality, satisfaction, perceived value, and image, the precise nature of the relationships that exist between these constructs and the understanding of their effect on customer behaviour still remains a key issue. This empirical study seeks to understand the relationships that exist between service quality and perceived value and how they impact customer satisfaction, corporate image, and behavioural intentions. The proposed model indicates that delivering high quality service and creating superior customer value can result in achieve high customer satisfaction, thus effecting the firm's corporate image, and ultimately leading to consumer retention.     

Exploring the relationship between individual values and the customer orientation of front-line employees

Abstract

Because of the nature of services, namely the inseparability of production and consumption, employee behaviours influence customer perceptions of service quality and satisfaction with the service provider. In particular, customer-oriented employees seek to help customers by addressing their needs, and this contributes to the building of customer satisfaction and the development of a relationship. Not surprisingly, research has been investigating the drivers of employees’ customer orientation. This paper examines how individual values influence the customer orientation of front-line service employees, a topic that has been unexplored in extant literature, and this is useful for the selection of employees who match the firm’s service strategy. To accomplish this, the study relies on the Schwartz value theory, which is applied to front-line employees in banking. The findings indicate that both resultant conservation and resultant self-enhancement affect the customer orientation of employees, and that these effects are moderated by job satisfaction and autonomy.     

Understanding how technology paradoxes affect customer satisfaction with self‐service technology: The role of performance ambiguity and trust in technology

This study examines the role of consumer technology paradoxes within the context of self‐service technology and the routes by which these paradoxes influence customer satisfaction evaluation. Analysis of survey data from online banking customers indicates that three paradoxes operate in this context: control/chaos, fulfill needs/create needs, and freedom/enslavement. The study reveals further that the effects of these paradoxes on customer satisfaction are mediated by consumer performance ambiguity and consumer trust in technology. Theoretical and managerial implications of consumer paradoxical experiences for technology‐based services are discussed. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Electronic and in-person service quality of hybrid services

The service industries have experienced dramatic changes in service delivery format because of fast-paced innovation in information technology. Hybrid services involve service deliveries through conventional and technology-enabled environments, each of which is complementary and non-interchangeable. However, limited research has examined consumer behavior in response to a series of relevant service episodes in different channels at different points in time. In other words, how customers perceive service quality at each service encounter and how the cumulative effect of these perceptions influences customers’ overall service value assessment and satisfaction remain unclear. This study addresses this research gap by investigating the sequential influence of e-service quality on in-person service quality in a hybrid service format in which interpersonal and computer-mediated services coexist but at different points in time. Empirical analysis shows that e-service quality directly and positively affects in-person service quality, which fully mediates the effects of e-service quality on perceived value and customer satisfaction. The sequence of service encounters matters because in-person service quality perception has a stronger effect than e-service quality on customer metrics. Cumulative quality perceptions significantly influence perceived value and overall customer satisfaction. Theoretical and managerial implications are presented in the discussion.     

Is online-to-offline customer care support essential for consumer service?

Customer satisfaction is the main pillar for convenient and profitable retailing. The retail sector continuously tried to develop new strategies to improve consumer satisfaction. It is impossible to provide each service directly to the consumer by the retailer. In this direction, the retailer establishes customer care to provide the best service to consumers. Consumer care can provide promotional or prevention services, increasing the consumer's satisfaction level. This study is developed to show the impact of retailers' customer care service for an offline-to-online retailing strategy. The demand is consumer support, advertisement, and selling price dependent. For maintaining consumer service, some free home delivery policies are offered, when consumers ordered more than a certain percentage of the amount. Finally, the total profit of this O2O retailing system is calculated by the classical optimization technique. Some special cases are discussed in the numerical section to prove the impact of customer care services. Numerical results prove that customer care support enhances the profit by 48.20%, whereas investment in the advertisement and home delivery strategy helps the retail industry to earn 44.80% and 16.74% more profit, respectively. Finally, from this study, it is clear that customer care activities are essential to increase the profit of the retailing sector.     

A neurophysiological exploration of the dynamic nature of emotions during the customer experience

This paper explores the benefits of measuring emotions and their dynamic nature during the customer experience with neurophysiological measures. In this study, emotions are measured during a service interaction (with self-service technology or a human employee) going through a series of touchpoints, including a service failure. We show that creating a loyalty card with the help of a service employee or self-service technology did not impact customers’ perceived service satisfaction and their behavioral intentions. This paper demonstrates that neurophysiological measures such as Galvanic Skin Response might be better equipped to unveil the dynamic nature of emotions (e.g., arousal) during the customer experience and that valence measured by neurophysiological tools (using electroencephalography) better reconciles with the effect found for satisfaction and behavioral intentions. Our findings have implications for both researchers and practitioners who want to understand and bolster customer experiences, thereby taking customer emotions and its appropriate measurement tools into consideration.     

The impact of staff empowerment and communication style on customer evaluations: The special case of service failure

Empowering front-line staff to deal with service failures has been proposed as a method of recovering from service breakdown and ensuring greater customer satisfaction. However, no empirical study has investigated consumer responses to empowerment strategies. This research investigates the effect on customer satisfaction and service quality of two employee characteristics: the degree to which the employee is empowered (full, limited, and none), and the employee's communication style (accommodative–informal and personal, and underaccommodative–formal and impersonal). These employee characteristics are studied within the context of service failures. Subjects were shown videotaped service scenarios, and asked to complete satisfaction and service quality ratings. Results revealed that the fully empowered employee produced more customer satisfaction than the other conditions, but only when the service provider used an accommodating style of communication. Fully empowered and nonempowered employees were not judged differently when an underaccommodating style of communication was adopted. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Key Account Management in information-intensive services

Key Account Management (KAM) is surprisingly little known marketing approach in retailing and consumer services context, however it has much to offer to companies in these industries. It provides an effective, practical and rather simple method for companies interested in increasing their profits by right customer and relationship management. Indeed, KAM is a business-to-business marketing approach, however most retailers and service companies can greatly benefit from it. A large number of retailers and service companies operate both in the consumer and business-to-business market. Few retailers or service providers have never invoiced another company. Moreover, most consumer goods and services are influenced by business-to-business services. The availability and quality of consumer goods and services often essentially depends on various business-to-business services in the earlier phases of marketing channels. Furthermore, by understanding the logic of KAM, retailers and consumer service providers can develop their own key supplier management. Information is one of the most important resources of goods and services in post-industrial economy. Information-intensive services are based on knowledge and refining of information. Increasing number of information-intensive services emerge both in the consumer and business-to-business market. This paper describes the nature of KAM and information-intensive services, and suggests a framework for KAM practices in information-intensive services.     

Affective States of the Consumer and Satisfaction with Services in the Airline Industry

Abstract

While its importance in marketing is never questioned, customer satisfaction has rightly been described as “a complex and elusive phenomenon.” The search continues for factors/variables that determine its presence and magnitude. This paper examines the affective aspect of customer satisfaction in the globally important, but highly competitive airline industry. Two major forms of affective state of the consumer are examined, namely: (i) mood, and (ii) quality of life. Findings show that both tend to have significant influence on the level of satisfaction with services in the airline industry. However, some elementary services tend to be more influenced than others by these affective states of the consumer. Implications, and managerial applications of the findings for augmenting customer satisfaction in the airline industry are discussed.     

Analysis of the moderating role of the gender variable in service recovery processes

In this study, the authors focus on service recovery processes and identify a set of key factors that drive satisfaction with the recovery process, which ultimately leads to customer loyalty. In addition, the authors investigate the role of gender as a potential moderating variable in the recovery process. Using a sample of 202 customers who had experienced a problem with their provider, filed a complaint and received a response from the company, the authors empirically test the proposed framework in the mobile phone market. The findings reveal that men tend to be more demanding when dealing with service providers and less loyal, while women tend to exhibit a more fully-developed sense of justice and greater attitudinal and behavioral loyalty. These results provide valuable insights for the consumer services industry: Companies can use gender information to manage complaints in order to restore customer satisfaction and increase customer loyalty more efficiently.     

Employee versus supervisor ratings of performance in the retail customer service sector: Differences in predictive validity for customer outcomes

Based on data from Maxham and Netemeyer [Maxham, J. G. and R. G. Netemeyer (2003). “Firms Reap What They Sow: The Effects of Employee Shared Values and Perceived Organizational Justice on Customer Evaluations of Complaint Handling,” Journal of Marketing, 67, 46-62], the authors present two field samples to examine predictive validity differences of service employee ratings of their performance versus supervisor ratings of employee performance with respect to customer satisfaction and customer likelihood of spreading positive word-of-mouth (WOM) after a service recovery attempt. The results generally show that supervisor ratings are more strongly positively related to customer satisfaction and WOM than are employee ratings of their own performances. The results also show that both supervisor ratings and employee ratings are related to customer satisfaction and WOM in a curvilinear fashion (as well as linear fashion). Employee extra-role performances (toward customers and the firm) show increasing returns at the higher levels of performance, and employee in-role customer performance generally shows a decreasing return at the higher level of customer in-role performance.These results suggest two managerial implications. First, supervisor ratings of customer service employee performances may be the preferred form of measurement for predicting customer outcomes. Second, maximizing in-role performance inputs may have decreasing returns for customer evaluations in the service recovery context; but maximizing extra-role performance inputs may actually “delight” customers, i.e., increasing returns for customer evaluations.     

Vertical performance management: Strategic implications for financial service

This paper examines the relationship between productivity and customer satisfaction in marketing consumer services. It presents a conceptual framework that highlights four dimensions of productivity measurement: capacity, perceived quality, profitability, and satisfaction. One of the more distinctive aspects of this presentation is its analysis of productivity from the dual perspectives of both the customer and the service provider. A preliminary formulation of the productivity model emphasizes the high degree of interaction between the evaluation of performance from these two perspectives. A recent service innovation in the area of electronic funds transfer illustrates this framework.     

Two-sided effects of customer participation: roles of relationships and social-interaction values in social services

This research aims to extend customer participation and value co-creation theory to the social-services sector, where consumer choice is restricted. This study examines the relationship between the value creation of participation and customer satisfaction in social services. The perceived value corresponding to different types of relationships was divided into company–customer (relationship value) and customer–customer (social-interaction value). To test hypotheses, data were collected via an online survey of customers using child-care centers in Korea. The participating customers had children who attended day-care centers, and the proposed hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling. Empirical result shows that customer participation as information resource and customer participation as co-developer affect the relationship and social-interaction values. The most important and interesting result is that the relationship value has a positive effect, but the social-interaction value has a negative one on customer satisfaction. These results suggest that customer participation in social services has both positive and negative outcomes, which means that the social-interaction value of co-creation does not always lead to customer satisfaction in a choice-limited service such as child care. This study explains a counterintuitive and interesting relationship between the social-interaction value and customer satisfaction by validating the moderating role of social network service-based interaction intensity in child-care services.     

Customer Satisfaction with E-Retailers: The Role of Product Type in the Relative Importance of Attributes

It is of strategic importance for e-retailers to allocate their resources to various service attributes according to their relative importance. How does one determine the relative importance of different service attributes? Does the relative importance of different service attributes remain the same across different product categories? These questions must be addressed by researchers and e-retailers. Since customer ratings for service attributes are highly correlated, modeling methods other than traditional regression models should be used to analyze the relative importance of service attributes to overall customer satisfaction. As such, this article utilizes neural networks in order to study the relative importance of e-retailer service attributes. Importantly, this article shows that the relative importance of e-retailer service attributes varies across different product categories (i.e., convenience, shopping, and specialty goods).     

How do Asia's two most important consumer markets differ? Japanese–Chinese differences in customer satisfaction and its formation

Little is known about international differences in the formation of customer satisfaction, particularly regarding developed and emerging markets in Asia. This lack of knowledge limits the competitiveness of Western companies in Asia. From the perspectives of economic and cultural country differences, this study thus compares customer satisfaction and its formation between Japan, China, and Germany (Western reference country). Customer satisfaction is higher in Japan than China for goods and private services but lower for public services. It is influenced more strongly by perceived quality and less strongly by perceived value (difference moderated by switching costs), public brand image, and quality expectations in Japan than China. Economic differences between developed (Japan, Germany) and emerging (China) markets influence consumer preference structures more strongly than cultural differences. Due to larger inter-Asian cultural variance than Western managers might expect, Chinese consumer preference structures differ more from Japanese than German consumer preference structures.     

Translating satisfaction determination from health care to the automotive industry

This study is based on the case of BMW, and aims to improve the determination of perceived consumer satisfaction in the automotive industry by transferring existing knowledge from the health care sector. A literature analysis of the health care sector and the automotive industry was conducted to identify the common concepts of determining satisfaction. These were the service encounter, situational factors, and sociodemographics. The practical application was tested by analyzing a contemporary survey from BMW. Based on the findings, managers responsible for customer satisfaction in after-sales services in the automotive industry could improve measurement of customer satisfaction.     

Consumer satisfaction with health-care services: The influence of involvement

The impact of involvement and ambiguity on satisfaction judgments for high-credence property services such as health care has not been studied. This study examines the level and process effects of involvement on satisfaction with two dimensions of a health-care service. We found that higher levels of customer involvement were associated with greater expectations and performance ratings for the ambiguous dimension of the service (physicians). Customer involvement had no influence on ratings for the nonambiguous aspects of the service (access mechanisms). Perceived performance was found to be the most influential predictor of satisfaction for low-involvement subjects. High-involvement subjects used disconfirmation and performance to evaluate physicians and only disconfirmation in forming satisfaction judgments for access mechanisms. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Consumer perceptions to support IoT based smart parcel locker logistics in China

In recent years, the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) based smart parcel lockers has developed very rapidly in Asia due to the wider applications from retailers, e-commerce companies, logistics companies, and consumers. The revolution of smart technologies has transformed the traditional way of last-mile delivery from logistics outlets to IoT-based parcel lockers due to the flexibility, convenience, and 24/7 accessibility. However, there are still many obstacles affecting the transformation of last-mile delivery especially in consumers perceptions towards the smart technologies. Therefore, in this study, we performed research based on the theory of service quality and customer satisfaction in the adoption of relevant technologies. This article divides the smart parcel lockers' service quality into five dimensions: service price, service reliability, convenience, fault handling capability, and service diversity. In this study, 272 valid questionnaires were collected from China to investigate consumer satisfaction with the smart parcel locker services. Statistical analysis, including the reliability and validity, was performed, followed by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The correlation between variables and the degree of influence on customer satisfaction and regression analysis was also undertaken in this study. The results revealed that the service price does not positively affect consumer satisfaction, and the other four underlying factors have a positive effect on consumer satisfaction. This research has significant impacts by determining the parcel lockers' core factors so as to foster the further development of last-mile services in the future.     

Customer satisfaction and qualities in public service: an intermediary customer perspective

From an intermediary customer perspective, this study empirically investigates the causal relationships between service quality, relationship quality, design quality, and customer satisfaction in the public service value chain. Cross-sectional survey data were collected from social work, childcare, and healthcare services and were analyzed using structural equation modeling. It is found that all the quality dimensions are antecedents to customer satisfaction and relations between quality dimensions show distinctive patterns. The results show that relationship quality does not directly affect customer satisfaction, but can indirectly influence satisfaction through the mediation of both service and design qualities. The effect of the relationship and design qualities on customer satisfaction is stronger than that of service quality.