Examines service provider behaviors that influence customer evaluation of service encounters. Develops a list of service provider behaviors relevant to customer evaluation of a service encounter. Examines performance of these behaviors in specific restaurant and medical transactions. Then...

Local government in the UK is not immune from the pressures driving successful organizations towards top quality services that delight their customers. Outlines some of the special features of local government service provision and the way in which these might affect the assessment of service...

Reviews and discusses the topic of customer satisfaction and its application to the hospitality and tourism industries. Defines the concept and analyzes its importance to services in general and to hospitality/tourism services in particular. Following a discussion on the dimensions and...

The management of the enhancement of the quality of service delivery is often primarily focused on minimising negative responses to product offerings, rather than maximising positive responses. To date there has been little debate on the negative aspects of quality. This paper reviews the...

It is commonly acknowledged that service quality can be measured by using attribute‐based and incident‐based measurements. Both methods are distinct in nature, but can be used complementarily. However, in the literature a simultaneous empirical investigation of the power of critical...

Building on disconfirmation theory, equity theory and affect‐balance theory, considers antecedents to satisfaction with service recovery. A theoretical model is proposed and tested empirically based on a cross‐sectional national sample of 201 dissatisfied customers complaining of services....

This empirical study of commercial banking relationships in France demonstrates that, despite the current emphasis on new technology, contact personnel remain important for the success of professional business‐to‐business services. When account managers are changed, the business clients feel...

Argues that the unidirectional measurement and evaluation of service quality in any specific service encounter is not enough in itself to understand the existing service quality between two actors in a dyadic service encounter. Therefore, a method is introduced for the express purpose of...

Presents two questionnaires for measuring service quality. Derived from the SERVQUAL instrument, they have been field tested on around 100 subjects. The adapted questionnaires are shorter and more flexible when compared with SERVQUAL. They may be used separately or in combination. One...

Successful firms are making a concerted effort to develop closer ties to their customers. However, the customer has not always been king. By describing the dialectic character of customer service and tracing it back in history, this paper provides some of the knowledge necessary to explain its...