Gaps Model

Service quality is referred to a valuation of how good a delivered service meets the customer’s expectation. Upper management

Today’s world competition is very strong in every kind of businesses. Every organisations must provide high quality products or services in order to survive, however their competitors also providing the same or comparable products or services. An important way to an organisation to get an edge over its competitors is to provide extra service to satisfy and delight their customers, which can retain them and also gain new customers. Therefore the achievement of customer satisfaction must be a major objective in all organisations.

(Dick & Basu, 1994) Identify Customer loyalty as the strength in relationship between a relative attitude of an individual and the individuals repeated patronage. (Selnes, 1993)States customer loyalty comprises of the chance of repurchase, chance of swapping and willingness of recommending the service to others. Higher customer loyalty leads to higher switching barriers. (Hepworth & Mateus, 1994)State that customer loyalty is the customer’s intent of re buying the same service or product from the same company.

Service quality - refers to difference between the level of service that is expected from consumers and the perception of the service that is actually received. (Caruana,

Customer satisfaction is the customer’s evaluation of a good or service in terms of whether it has met their needs and expectations (Vander Schee, 2016). The culture of the organization is to focus on delighting customers rather than on selling products (Lamb, Hair, & McDaniel, 2017). An example of a highly satisfied customer would be Nicole Snow, who owns a small business in Maine. One day she reached out to FedEx on social networks and asked for help in getting her supply chain set up. The team responded immediately and helped her solve the problem (“FedEx,” 2015). Here customer satisfaction is greatly shown the customers’ needs and expectations have been met by

Over the decades there were tremendous amount of challenges for every business. Customers have more knowledge, they have more options, and they have higher expectations. Customers are more informed with the humungous development in technology. Having more options in front of them, expectations has surpassed in retail industry. Loyalty is a customer having faith that your organization’s product or services offered is the best for them. It is the process of tapping the buying pattern of customers in a store based on their preferences. Customer loyalty is significant because it is economical to retain the old customers rather than acquiring new customers. So, organizations employ loyalty programs which reward customers for their repeat business.

By definition, customer loyalty is the result of consistently positive emotional experience, physical attribute-based satisfaction and perceived

Q1. Identify three key characteristics of the marketing concept. A. Marketing is very important and a key concpet in creating a succesful business. "Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitabily". The marketing concept states that success is achieved by identifying needs and wants of the target market satisfying them better than competitors.

While I’m an atypical U.S. consumer who doesn’t buy into marketing hype, I do have strong product/service loyalty affiliations. I’ll try to keep my Journal entry under 1000 words! I like to revisit the meaning of familiar words. Merriam-Webster (n.d.) defines loyalty as, “The quality or state or an instance of being loyal”. This is exactly what brand loyalty and loyalty programs are trying to create: an ongoing experience with multiple touch-points that captures followers and keeps them engaged through rewards, added value, and “prestige”. The goal is to lengthen “the lifetime value of the customer” (Tanner & Raymond, 2010, p. 284) which helps to maximize profits.

Quality is the features and characteristics of products (goods) and services that bears its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs. Quality expectation can go a long way within a business as the consumers influences on a business it what drives the business, certain quality standard is to be uphold.

Some of the ways that businesses can build loyalty would be by offering loyalty programs, Interacting with customers, surveys, creating institutional ties, and personalized marketing. Another way to build loyalty is to treat your employees so well that they treat your customers well. If you have happy employees they will treat your customers happy. “The link between satisfaction and loyalty however is not proportional” (Kotler, Keller, 2009, p71), so businesses must

Customer satisfaction and service quality are the two important components that direct anyone’s attention in every concept related to marketing, services, etc. (Spreng and Mackoy, 2006). In today’s competitive era, the success lies in

Quality: - Quality means fitness of the product or services to use by the Customer. Quality means competitive cost, Productivity, timely delivery of the services or products and total customer Satisfaction in terms of the product and services and Total services paid by customer to the company.

Service Quality as described by (William G. Zikmund, 1993) “is the degree to which the performance of service provider’s matches customer expectations. It can also be defined as those essential characteristics of a service that measures its excellence”.

Sureshchandra, Rajendran and Anantharaman (2002) identified five critical aspects of service quality from the customers point of view namely core service/service product, human element of service delivery, systematisation of service delivery, tangibles of service and lastly social responsibility in order to conceptualise service quality. Table 1 will further provide an explanation to the five critical aspects of service quality as outlined by Sureshchandra et al (2002).