Customer Satisfaction with Services

Marketing

The academic field of marketing not only helped to pioneer the specification of how services differ from goods; it also drove the assessment of service quality and customer satisfaction from a technical approach to what has been labeled a user-based approach. The technical approach bases quality assessment on conformance to objective and readily measured standards set for the attributes of the output, and thus it is best suited to measuring the quality of mass-produced standardized goods.

The user-based approach assumes that quality is more subjective and therefore more appropriately measured from the perspective of the user or customer. This better fits the intangible, experiential nature of many services. Specifically, goods and services vary in their search, experience, and credence qualities. Prototypical services possess few easily observed search qualities (e.g., color and hardness) but instead are characterized more by experience qualities (e.g., taste) and difficult-to-evaluate credence qualities (e.g., characteristics that customers may need to accept on faith, such as the adequacy of a will). In turn, experience-based intangibility provides limited objective reference points for assessing the value of services, makes it difficult to quantitatively measure output and service quality, and makes it difficult to set specific, clear goals for employees.

The earliest model—and arguably the most visible measure of quality from the user's perspective—SERVQUAL, was developed by three pioneering services marketing researchers, A. Parasuraman, Valarie Zeithaml, and Leonard Berry. This model and survey of service quality assesses five dimensions—reliability, empathy, assurance, responsiveness, and tangibles—using a gap model that measures both expectations of how the service should occur and perceptions of what actually happened. These same five dimensions have not always emerged in studies done by other researchers; indeed, the original authors themselves stated that SERVQUAL and its factors may not be unconditionally applicable for all types of service situations.

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