A quantitative approach to measure customer expectation for service innovation within service experience delivery

Abstract

Customer-focused service design and innovation is the key for service providers to deliver what services customers actually want. Although numerous articles emphasize the importance of customer expectations in many disciplines, only there was the non real-time data captured by previous empirical research. Besides, there has been no mathematical mechanism to correctly catch customer expectations in previous research. Service providers must make additional efforts to analyze and predict customers' needs according to previous empirical research, yet the gap between service providers' prediction and customer expectations has been still obvious occurring in practice. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to propose a systematical and quantitative expectation measurement model, which is based on Fechner's Law and the concepts of operation risk, for service providers to measure the real time customer expectations during service experiences delivery.