Valarie A. Zeithaml

A conceptual model of service quality and its implications for future research

The attainment of quality in products and services has become a pivotal concern of the 1980s. While quality in tangible goods has been described and measured by marketers, quality in services is la...

Consumer Perceptions of Price, Quality, and Value: A Means-End Model and Synthesis of Evidence

Evidence from past research and insights from an exploratory investigation are combined in a conceptual model that defines and relates price, perceived quality, and perceived value. Propositions ab...

The behavioral consequences of service quality

If service quality relates to retention of customers at the aggregate level, as other research has indicated, then evidence of its impact on customers’ behavioral responses should be detectable. Th...

Reassessment of Expectations as a Comparison Standard in Measuring Service Quaiity: implications for Furtiier Research

The authors respond to concerns raised by Cronin and Taylor (1992) and Teas (1993) about the SERVQUAL instrument and the perceptions-minus-expectations specification invoked by it to operationalize...

E-S-QUAL: A Multiple-Item Scale for Assessing Electronic Service Quality

Using the means-end framework as a theoretical foundation, this article conceptualizes, constructs, refines, and tests a multiple-item scale (E-S-QUAL) for measuring the service quality delivered by Web sites on which customers shop online. Two stages of empirical data collection revealed that two different scales were necessary for capturing electronic service quality. The basic E-S-QUAL scale developed in the research is a 22-item scale of four dimensions: efficiency, fulfillment, system availability, and privacy. The second scale, E-RecS-QUAL, is salient only to customers who had nonroutine encounters with the sites and contains 11 items in three dimensions: responsiveness, compensation, and contact. Both scales demonstrate good psychometric properties based on findings from a variety of reliability and validity tests and build on the research already conducted on the topic. Directions for further research on electronic service quality are offered. Managerial implications stemming from the empirical findings about E-S-QUAL are also discussed.

The Nature and Determinants of Customer Expectations of Service

A conceptual model articulating the nature and determinants of customer expectations of service is proposed and discussed. The model specifies three different types of service expectations: desired service, adequate service, and predicted service. Seventeen propositions about service expectations and their antecedents are provided. Discussion centers on the research implications of the model and its propositions.

Service Quality Delivery Through Web Sites: A Critical Review of Extant Knowledge

Evidence exists that service quality delivery through Web sites is an essential strategy to success, possibly more important than low price and Web presence. To deliver superior service quality, managers of companies with Web presences must first understand how customers perceive and evaluate online customer service. Information on this topic is beginning to emerge from both academic and practitioner sources, but this information has not yet been examined as a whole. The goals of this article are to review and synthesize the literature about service quality delivery through Web sites, describe what is known about the topic, and develop an agenda for needed research.

Communication and control processes in the delivery of service quality

Delivering consistently good service quality is difficult but profitable for service organizations. Understanding why it is so difficult and how it might be facilitated is the purpose of the articl...

Return on Marketing: Using Customer Equity to Focus Marketing Strategy

The authors present a unified strategic framework that enables competing marketing strategy options to be traded off on the basis of projected financial return, which is operationalized as the change in a firms customer equity relative to the incremental expenditure necessary to produce the change. The change in the firms customer equity is the change in its current and future customers’ lifetime values, summed across all customers in the industry. Each customers lifetime value results from the frequency of category purchases, average quantity of purchase, and brand-switching patterns combined with the firms contribution margin. The brand-switching matrix can be estimated from either longitudinal panel data or cross-sectional survey data, using a logit choice model. Firms can analyze drivers that have the greatest impact, compare the drivers’ performance with that of competitors’ drivers, and project return on investment from improvements in the drivers. To demonstrate how the approach can be implemented in a specific corporate setting and to show the methods used to test and validate the model, the authors illustrate a detailed application of the approach by using data from the airline industry. Their framework enables what-if evaluation of marketing return on investment, which can include such criteria as return on quality, return on advertising, return on loyalty programs, and even return on corporate citizenship, given a particular shift in customer perceptions. This enables the firm to focus marketing efforts on strategic initiatives that generate the greatest return.

Service quality, profitability, and the economic worth of customers: What we know and what we need to learn

In the past, expenditures on quality have not been explicitly linked to profits because costs and savings were the only variables on which information was available. More recently, evidence about the profit consequences of service quality stemming from other sources has been found. This article synthesizes recent evidence and identifies relationships between service quality and profits that have been and need to be examined. The article views the literature in six categories: (1) direct effects of service quality on profits; (2) offensive effects; (3) defensive effects; (4) the link between perceived service quality and purchase intentions; (5) customer and segment profitability; and (6) key service drivers of service quality, customer retention, and profitability. In each category, the author identifies what is known and then suggests an agenda of relationships needing validation and questions needing answers. The article is organized around a conceptual framework linking the six topics.