The Relationships between Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction

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.

For different types of companies, quality might refer to quality of products or quality of service. Compares with quality of products, service quality is much more difficult to measure because service is intangible and acts and processes only existing in time. In addition, service has unique characteristic which cannot be found in products, such as customer influence, inseparability of production and consumption, heterogeneity, perishability and labor intensity (Nie & Kellogg, 1999). Even though, there are still many practitioners and academics are keen on measuring service quality because it has already emerged as a key strategic issue. Companies want to better understand service quality, and to establish methods for improving quality to achieve competitive advantage and build customer loyalty (Abdullah, 2006). Based on the importance of service quality, an increasing number of literatures and companies pay attention to measuring

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,

Wang (2010) defined service quality as global judgement or an attitude towards the superiority of a service. Bitner and Hubbert (1994) also define service quality as “the customer’s overall impression of the relative inferiority and superiority of the organization and its services”. Moreover, Zeithaml and Bitner (2003) define “service quality is a focused evaluation that reflects the customer’s perception of specific dimensions of

The key to ensuring good quality service is meeting or exceeding what the customers expect from services. Judgements of high and low quality depend on how customers the actual service performance in the context of what they expected. Service quality, as perceived by the customers, can be defined as the extent of discrepancy but customers’ expectations or desires and their

Source : Adapted from A. Parasuraman, Valerie Zeithaml, and Leonard Berry, “A Conceptual Model of Service Quality and Its Implications for Future Research,” Journal of Marketing, 49 (Fall 1985)

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

Customer preferences are important concept within services marketing theory. According to my review, service quality have significant relationship with customer preferences. Their finding indicates that the service quality provided by staff is fundamental and crucial to the customer satisfaction in the restaurants. Furthermore, customers will choose the restaurants based on their satisfaction level. In another study by Cronin and Taylor (1992), the study have shown the perceived service quality can greatly affect customers’ satisfaction and customer preferences. Many restaurants out there will pay more attention on service quality because it will directly influencing the customer preferences which will lead to customer revisit and customer will become loyalty to the restaurants. And will directly affect he restaurant revenue. In addition, Yüksel & Yüksel (2002) stated that service quality had the most significant impact on dining satisfaction at the aggregate market

The obvious need for satisfying the firm’s customer is to expand the business, to gain a higher market share, and to acquire repeat and referral business, all of which lead to improved profitability (Barsky, 1992). Studies conducted by Cronin and Taylor (1992) in service sectors such as: banking, pest control, dry cleaning, and fast food; found that customer satisfaction has a significant effect on purchase intentions in all four sectors. Similarly, in the health-care sector, McAlexander et al. (1994) found that patient satisfaction and service quality have a significant effect on future purchase intentions.(Kandampully and Suhartanto,

Considering service sector it is highly depends on the customers. Customer loyalty is influenced by customer-employee relationship. It is important for organizations to know how customers perceive the quality of services and how these perceptions translate into customer satisfaction and behavioral intentions. Moreover, for an effective marketing strategy and organizational development, organizations want to understand the ways of customer satisfaction. Service quality is the difference among consumer expectations and their perceptions of the service that they received.

It is the overall of service quality gap, made up of sum total of the preceding four gaps, and is thus determines by the nature of gaps associated with the overall design, marketing and delivery of services. (services management, Jay A.Kandampully 2007 ) This is the most complex part where customer may misinterpret the service quality. To cite a situation, manager may keep asking the customer regarding the services feedback but the consumer might indicate it that something is really wrong (Chandrashekhar, 2014).

Commence with the concept of service quality, satisfaction is an substantial idea which known as noted value to comply with customer expectation (Edvardsson 1998). Therefore, it is needed satisfaction measurement in perceiving quality of service whether for customer or non customer perception (Fellesson and Friman 2008). Moreover, converting satisfaction into qualitative

Service is defined in many different ways, all of which can be seen as accurate. An example of one of them pointed out by Cook (2008 p.185) “Customer service is what the customer says it is”. This assignment will be examining the importance of customer service, delivered by business and its employees and why customer satisfaction is important especially within the service sector. To illustrate this, an example of a bad customer service that was condoned by myself will be provided.

Service quality represents a fundamental aspect of delivery, which strongly influences consumer satisfaction and, as a result, loyalty. In today’s global market a customer’s service expectation has to be met and exceeded eventually in order to retain customers as well as achieve success. Perceived quality of a product or a service is becoming one of the major competitive factors in the business world and has led to the innovation of the ‘Quality Era’ (Peeler, 1996). In simple words, the comparison of customer expectations with service performance is service quality. On the other hand, customer satisfaction is defined as a pleasurable fulfilment response toward a good, service, benefit, or reward (Oliver, 1997). Both of these

Q3 Contemplate your own recent experiences as a service consumer. On which dimensions of service quality have you most often experienced a large gap between your expectations and your perceptions of the service performance? What do you think the underlying causes might be? What steps should management take to improve quality?