Assessing the effects of quality, value, and customer satisfaction on consumer behavioral intentions in service environments

Two field experiments examined the effectiveness of signs requesting hotel guests’ participation in an environmental conservation program. Appeals employing descriptive norms (e.g., “the majority of guests reuse their towels”) proved superior to a traditional appeal widely used by hotels that focused solely on environmental protection. Moreover, normative appeals were most effective when describing group behavior that occurred in the setting that most closely matched individuals’ immediate situational circumstances (e.g., “the majority of guests in this room reuse their towels”), which we refer to as provincial norms. Theoretical and practical implications for managing proenvironmental efforts are discussed.

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A Room with a Viewpoint: Using Social Norms to Motivate Environmental Conservation in Hotels

Customers often react strongly to service failures, so it is critical that an organization's recovery efforts be equally strong and effective. In this article, the authors develop a model of custom...

http://www.ruthnbolton.com/Publications/ServiceFailureandRecovery.pdf?origin=publication_detail

A model of customer satisfaction with service encounters involving failure and recovery

The growing number of academic studies on customer satisfaction and the mixed findings they report complicate efforts among managers and academics to identify the antecedents to, and outcomes of, businesses having more-versus less-satisfied customers. These mixed findings and the growing emphasis by managers on having satisfied customers point to the value of empirically synthesizing the evidence on customer satisfaction to assess current knowledge. To this end, the authors conduct a meta-analysis of the reported findings on customer satisfaction. They document that equity and disconfirmation are most strongly related to customer satisfaction on average. They also find that measurement and method factors that characterize the research often moderate relationship strength between satisfaction and its antecedents and outcomes. The authors discuss the implications surrounding these effects and offer several directions for future research.

Customer Satisfaction: A Meta-Analysis of the Empirical Evidence:

Although researchers and managers pay increasing attention to customer value, satisfaction, loyalty, and switching costs, not much is known about their interrelationships. Prior research has examined the relationships within subsets of these constructs, mainly in the business-to-consumer (B2C) environment. The authors extend prior research by developing a conceptual framework linking all of these constructs in a business-to-business (B2B) service setting. On the basis of the cognition-affect-behavior model, the authors hypothesize that customer satisfaction mediates the relationship between customer value and customer loyalty, and that customer satisfaction and loyalty have significant reciprocal effects on each other. Furthermore, the potential interaction effect of satisfaction and switching costs, and the quadratic effect of satisfaction, on loyalty are explored. The authors test the hypotheses on data obtained from a courier service provider in a B2B context. The results support most of the hypotheses and, in particular, confirm the mediating role of customer satisfaction.

Customer Value, Satisfaction, Loyalty, and Switching Costs: An Illustration From a Business-to-Business Service Context:

http://www.personal.psu.edu/jxb14/M554/articles/Spreng&Mackoy1996.pdf

An empirical examination of a model of perceived service quality and satisfaction

Examines the relative importance of service recovery in determining overall satisfaction and behavioral intentions. Recommendations include suggestions for implementing a service recovery program and for encouraging dissatisfied customers to complain.

Service recovery: Impact on satisfaction and intentions

Bayesian network methodology is used to model key linkages of the service-profit chain within the context of transportation service satisfaction. Bayesian networks offer some advantages for implementing managerially focused models over other statistical techniques designed primarily for evaluating theoretical models. These advantages are (1) providing a causal explanation using observable variables within a single multivariate model, (2) analysis of nonlinear relationships contained in ordinal measurements, (3) accommodation of branching patterns that occur in data collection, and (4) the ability to conduct probabilistic inference for prediction and diagnostics with an output metric that can be understood by managers and academics. Sample data from 1,101 recent transport service customers are utilized to select and validate a Bayesian network and conduct probabilistic inference.

/pdf/a-bayesian-network-estimation-of-the-service-profit-chain-35grxnn92m.pdf

A Bayesian Network Estimation of the Service-Profit Chain for Transport Service Satisfaction

This article proposes the Immigrant Business Enterprises Classification Framework to organize immigrant-owned businesses into categories associated with different levels of business integration into a host country's mainstream business community. The article applies the framework and reports the findings of structured face-to-face interviews with 199 Hispanic business enterprises (HBEs) in Indianapolis. The authors find Hispanic-owned businesses hold different characteristics depending upon the integration category in which they are classified; the findings suggest that to support immigrant entrepreneurship, governments, business development organizations, and researchers should address category-specific challenges, opportunities, and needs. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Immigrant business enterprises: A classification framework conceptualization and test

A framework is proposed for analyzing the consumption culture, including its micro/personal and macrolexternal covariates and critiques. Two main questions emerge: (1) Are goods assigned excess meaning, such that their pursuit distracts an individual from achieving true meaning in life? (2) Does the consumption culture destroy collective values and detract from issues in the public domain?

Robert Mackoy

Papers

An empirical examination of a model of perceived service quality and satisfaction

Service recovery: Impact on satisfaction and intentions

A Bayesian Network Estimation of the Service-Profit Chain for Transport Service Satisfaction

Immigrant business enterprises: A classification framework conceptualization and test

The Consumption Culture and Its Critiques: A Framework for Analysis: