Customer Expectations and Service Quality Dimensions Consistency

Service marketers bemoan what they perceive as an unprecedented increase of customer expectations in many service industries. Customer expectations are on rise with each competitive advance. While at most everybody has an intuitive sense of what expectations are, service marketers need a far more thorough and clear understanding of expectations in order to comprehend the concept of service quality and to measure and manage it. A literature review suggests that the measurement of service quality is full of controversy associated with many issues, of which an important few are : the type of expectations customers hold in the evaluation, important manageable service quality dimensions / attributes that define it in its full framework and dimensional consistency across the service categories. The paper examines these aspects in select services. The results suggest that (1) Customer 'would' and 'should' expectations differ significantly at most of the times, (2) 'would' expectations are comparatively closer to the service performance, (3) all the suggested dimensions of service quality are important, and (4) service quality may not always be the same five-factor structure as proposed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry from time to time.