Suchergebnisse

Dynamics in Service Quality Perceptions — A Longitudinal Approach to Evaluate the Outcome Dimension in Service Quality Perceptions -- National Customer Satisfaction Indices: A Critical Investigation from an Application Perspective -- The Link between Customer Satisfaction and Dealer Satisfaction — The case of the German Car Industry -- Criticality of Critical Incidents in Customer Relationships -- Critical Incidents in Dutch Consumer Press: Why Dissatisfied Customers Complain with Third Parties -- Achieving Service Quality through the Application of Importance-Performance Analysis -- The Sequential Incident Technique for Innovations (SITI) — A Tool for Generating Improvements and Ideas in Service Processes -- Beyond the Call of Duty: The Impact of Perceived Support on Attitudes and Behavior of Temporary Call Center Agents -- Quality Management and Organizational Change -- Sales-Related Benefit-Analysis of Service Quality Investments — The Moderating Role of Customer Relationship Type -- List of Abstracts -- Biographies.

It has often been advocated that successful new service (product) development groups should bind into a cohesive unit, sharing a common direction and vision. This suggests close connections and communication between members of the department. The authors conducted two communication network studies to examine the impact of interpersonal communication (i.e., within team, cross team, and cross company) on market and technological learning during new financial service development within the marketing department of banks. They conclude that close cooperation, signified by a strong integration and a central position within the communication network, could be detrimental for learning activities. For service innovation management, the biggest challenge seems to be the preservation of heterogeneity and diversity among individuals and groups both within and across the marketing department to ensure learning. Both boundary-spanning communication and the presence of individuals within loosely coupled marketing networks seem effective communication conditions to obtain a rich learning environment.

The implementation of a superior service strategy strongly depends on the attitude and behavior of customer contact personnel in service organizations. However, conflicting demands of organizational constraints, service managers, service teams, and customers frequently lead to role stress of service employees. In this article, the authors investigate antecedents and consequences of role stress experienced in after-sales service management of an international office equipment manufacturer from a longitudinal perspective. Empowering service employees by giving them authority and responsibility decreases their sense of role stress and, at the same time, enhances job satisfaction. Moreover, the authors notice a negative short-term and a positive long-term effect of the presence of rules and regulations. In the short term, this leads to higher role conflict. Finally, on the basis of the positive lagged effect of perceived group cohesiveness on role ambiguity, the authors conclude that creating "tight-knit" workgroups can actually prove detrimental because the norms they develop might be hard to change.

The authors have performed an experimental study to assess whether an extension with relatively low service intensiveness compared to the parent product is evaluated differently from an extension with higher service intensiveness. The empirical evidence from this article indicates that the quality of an extension product will be evaluated more favorably when it involves lower service intensiveness than higher service intensiveness. Furthermore, the results reveal that the difference in extension evaluations, due to the varying levels of service intensiveness involved in the extension products, is positively affected by the perceived similarity between an extension and its parent product. Finally, it is also found that consumers have different postevaluations on the parent brand due to different degrees of service intensiveness involved in the extension products. Meanwhile, the perceived similarity will reinforce this difference in consumers'postevaluations.

This article examines antecedents and consequences of the adoption level of standardized information technology (IT) versus customized IT in self-managing teams (SMTs) in a financial services institution. Linkages between specified antecedents and the adoption levels of standardized and customized IT were investigated using data collected from bank employees and in-company databases. The authors find positive individual-level effects of tolerance of self-management, ease of use, and innovativeness on the adoption level of standardized IT and positive individual-level effects of tolerance of self-management and perceived usefulness on the adoption level of customized IT. These findings suggest that discriminating between different types of IT creates a better understanding of IT adoption in SMTs. A similar investigation of the IT adoption-service performance relationships shows that the adoption level of customized IT rather than of standardized IT has a crucial impact on service performance both in terms of customer satisfaction and productivity.

Service interactions run a gamut from an instrumental self-focus to full social appreciation. Observing another customer's incivility toward a frontline employee can emphasize social concerns as guiding principles for the observer's own service interaction. Five studies test these dynamics; the results reveal that an incivility incident leads observers to prioritize social over market concerns. This reprioritization becomes manifest in a subsequent service interaction through increased feelings of warmth toward the employee who experienced incivility. In turn, feelings of warmth prompt observers to provide emotional support to the affected employee. Yet such prosocial inclinations are less likely when an employee is held responsible for or reciprocates incivility. Finally, this article also examines the effects of different employee reaction strategies on observers' inferences about the employee and the service firm, showing that observers are most positively disposed toward the employee and the firm when the former reacts to incivility with a polite reprimand. Together, the results suggest that, contrary to past theorizing, observing customers may contribute to employee well-being, contingent on appropriate employee responses. Notably, the commonly prescribed polite, submissive employee reaction that requires emotional labor may not be the most desirable reaction—neither for the employee nor for the firm.

Effective measurement and analysis of service quality are an essential first step in its improvement. This paper discusses the development of neural network models for this purpose. A valid neural network model for service quality is initially developed. Customer data from a SERVQUAL survey at an auto‐dealership network in The Netherlands provide the basis for model development. Different definitions of service quality measurement are modelled using the neural network approach. The perception‐minus‐expectation model of service quality was found not to be as accurate as the perception‐only model in predicting service quality. While this is consistent with the literature, this study also shows that the more intuitively appealing but mathematically less convenient expectation‐minus‐perception model out‐performs all the other service quality measurement models. The study also provides an analytical basis for the importance of expectation in the measurement of service quality. However, the study demonstrates the need for further study before neural network models may be effectively used for sensitivity analyses involving specific dimensions of service quality.

Branding decisions are becoming increasingly important in services, but little service-specific research has focused on this domain so far. This is surprising, as the service industry accounts for an ever-growing share of the global economy, whereas service aspects have become increasingly important for all goods. Marketing managers may want to capitalize on previously acquired brand equity by extending a reputable brand to a new category. Little is known, however, about the extent to which consumerbased brand equity transfers to unrelated categories in a services context. The authors have replicated Aaker and Keller's (1990) study and extended it to the services domain. Our data set provides evidence that in a services context, consumers use complementarity to the original category as a major cue to evaluate extensions. As a consequence, brand extension strategies could probably be used most successfully in cases where a significant similarity in service delivery processes exists.

The measurement of perceived service quality using the SERVQUAL approach has been criticized by a number of authors recently. This criticism concerns the conceptual basis of this methodology as well as its empirical operationalization. Presents a complementary approach to measuring service quality based on conjoint analysis. Discusses the application of both SERVQUAL and conjoint analysis in the context of measuring customer service quality in international marketing channels and evaluates how the results may lead to a more comprehensive insight into the quality of customer service and provide a basis for segmentation and optimization of customer service.