Abstract
Continuous improvement of customer (user) service is essential to successful development of business in today’s highly competitive, dynamic and complex business environment. There is no exception from it for philanthropic areas including libraries. Thus, this paper reviews the existing literature related to customer satisfaction in relation to service quality to identify the research issues and implications to establish further research avenues in the field. The study revealed that there is a consensus among service marketing researchers on the causal sequence/order of the concepts of customer satisfaction and service quality. Through conceptual improvement and empirical findings of past studies, most researchers have concurred on the fact that quality judgments cause satisfaction, leading to the finding on service quality being the antecedent of customer satisfaction. The formation of satisfaction in relation to service quality is generally based upon some significant theories identified in the literature and it recognised two dominant theoretical paradigms, disconfirmation and performance-only, which can be duly used for modelling customer satisfaction through the service quality perspective in organisations, enabling them to perform possible customer-led service quality evaluations. Secondly, the review more closely examined the potentiality of the prevalent service quality and customer satisfaction models which have been applied in the field of library and information services, such as SERVQUAL, SERVPREF and LibQUAL, understand the customer satisfaction process in the context of service quality. These models were, however, not adequately qualified to confirm their strong applicability for the modelling of the satisfaction process in libraries. Finally, the review concluded with fourteen research issues and their implications relating to library services in demonstrating the void of the prevailing body of knowledge, for new research avenues. Keywords: Customer satisfaction; User satisfaction; Service quality; User services; Library marketing; User modelling DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4038/jula.v15i1.3188 Journal of the University Librarians’ Association of Sri Lanka, Vol.15, Issue 1, June 2011; 23-82
Highlights
Continuous improvement of customer service is essential to successful development of business in today’s highly competitive, dynamic and complex business environment
Service marketing The advancement of innovations–the technical developments of the knowledge era–have made a significant contribution to the market economy in changing the face of its services
We find that service quality is directly influenced only by perceptions of performance
Summary
Continuous improvement of customer (user) service is essential to successful development of business in today’s highly competitive, dynamic and complex business environment. The review more closely examined the potentiality of the prevalent service quality and customer satisfaction models which have been applied in the field of library and information services, such as SERVQUAL, SERVPREF and LibQUAL, understand the customer satisfaction process in the context of service quality. There are other service organisations, such as schools, libraries and hospitals, which have not resorted to marketing their services because of the lack of competition they faced, until recently. The focus of marketing has been revolutionised from the early emphasis on the provision of goods to the new emphasis on the provision of services, based upon the concept of economic exchange This insinuates that goods should be marketed in a service context, rather than vice versa (Lovelock & Wirtz 2004). According to Sheth, Sisodia and Sharma (2000), cited in Vargo & Lusch (2004: 6), “service centered view of marketing is customer centric.” Wright (1995: 37) observed that “firms ... need marketing skills to cope with the increasing competitive environment and rising consumer expectations.”
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