Abstract
Service quality is becoming more crucial for oil and gas firms to maintain their market shares. This study identified the perception of customers of petroleum services firm (NNPC) through the relationship of five factors along with the demographic characteristics of customers. A total of 304 retail customers who patronize petroleum filling stations have been taken for the study and convenience sampling method was adopted for collecting a sample. Factor analysis revealed five factors and results of analysis of variance (ANOVA) indicated that while age, gender, occupation have no significant effect on customer perception of service quality income and qualification on the contrary differs significantly. The paper therefore recommends among other things that, the concepts and principles of total quality management (TQM) are recommended for holistic study, in addition to contemporary marketing management issues such as relationship marketing, value analysis and permission marketing, among others. Efforts should also be made by petroleum marketers to understand the relevant factors that affect both clients’ behaviours so as to understand the strategic options to be adopted to cope with such behaviours.
 
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Highlights
IntroductionDue largely to the highly technical nature of exploration and production, the sector depends substantially on imported technologies and facilities for most of its operations
4.1 Hypothesis Testing: The Factor Analysis A principal component factor analysis with varimax rotation was performed on the 16 items that assessed the perceived service quality of the retail petroleum
This study analyzed the practicality of measuring the retail service quality perceptions and its influence on demographic factors
Summary
Due largely to the highly technical nature of exploration and production, the sector depends substantially on imported technologies and facilities for most of its operations. Nigeria is the leading oil and gas producer in Africa, currently ranked the seventh highest in the world (NNPC, 2004). In addition to the above, Nigeria which is widely referred to as a gas province, has natural gas reserves that triple crude oil reserves, being estimated in excess of 187.5 trillion standard cubic feet (scf) (NNPC, 2004). The Federal Government has stated that one of its objectives is to achieve 50 per cent local content in the oil and gas sector by 2010. This wasn’t unrealizable due to poor production and distribution roles
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