Customer Experience in Sports Centres: Adaptation and Validation of a Measurement Scale

Abstract

The service experience in fitness centres is important for understanding how users perceive and value the quality of the service. The service experience in fitness centres is constructed from the expectations and needs of the users and the capacity of the centre to satisfy them. This paper aims to adapt and validate the consumer experience quality (EXQ) scale (Klaus and Maklan, 2012) that analyses consumer experience in the context of fitness centres. This research was carried out in a sports centre in Spain with a sample of 413 users (52% male, 48% female) and an average age of 36.5 years. A CFA was carried out to check the fit of the model and then to check the reliability and validity of the scale, as well as the correlations with other factors. It can be seen that after different steps, the model shows good fitting as well as good reliability and validity values. The research also shows that this scale significantly predicts the satisfaction and future intentions of the service users. Therefore, managers of sports centres should consider the perceptions and positive experiences of their users in order to improve the viability of their service.