Description of Subjective Impression for the Service Experience

Abstract

The goal of the service activity is to give customers a positive impression on their experiences. Recently, the service quality is discussed in the context of the “user experience”. But it should be noted that the quality of service experience is different from that of user experience for the product in terms of its intangibility, inseparability of production and consumption, heterogeneity and perishability as was proposed by Zeithaml et al. (1985). The important point of the discussions on the user experience that we can apply to the service experience is that the quality of experience should be analyzed and discussed not from the stance of the manufacturer (or the service-provider) but from that of the user (or the customer). In other words, designers and engineers cannot design the user experience per se but can only design “for” the user experience. Because of this fact, we should put more emphasis on the subjective aspects, i.e. affective and pleasurable aspects, of the service activity.