Abstract
Turkey is a fast growing market for global coffeehouse brands. This exploratory study investigates the service quality considerations of coffeehouse chains as perceived by the customers; namely customer expectations, loyalty, reasons of preference over coffee house brands, and service attributes of the coffee house brands in Turkey. Data are collected from a sample in several popular shopping malls in different parts of Istanbul that shelters coffeehouses of all of the brands included in this study through a survey questionnaire. The sample is chosen randomly and the survey is conducted mostly at weekends. The brands included in this survey are the five top global brands and one domestic brand. Results give evidence that further study may expose more revealing findings about customer satisfaction and commitment in coffee house brands.
Highlights
Service industries have learned it through past experience that in today‟s fast-changing volatile markets customers switch brands so quickly when they are not fully satisfied with the products or services they‟ve been getting
Silvestro and Cross (2000) points out that there is a strong correlation between several variables: growth; customer loyalty; customer satisfaction; the value of goods and services delivered to customers; service quality and employee capability
It has been well established by a number of studies that service quality is an antecedent of customer satisfaction (Chow et al, 2007), which in turn leads to favorable behavioral intentions such as repurchase and recommendation to others (Cheng, 2006; Ladhari et al, 2008)
Summary
Service industries have learned it through past experience that in today‟s fast-changing volatile markets customers switch brands so quickly when they are not fully satisfied with the products or services they‟ve been getting. The quality and satisfaction concepts have been linked to customer behavioral intentions like purchase and loyalty intention, willingness to spread positive word of mouth, referral, and complaint intention by many researchers (Olsen, 2002; Soderlund & Ohman, 2005) It has been well established by a number of studies that service quality is an antecedent of customer satisfaction (Chow et al, 2007), which in turn leads to favorable behavioral intentions such as repurchase and recommendation to others (Cheng, 2006; Ladhari et al, 2008). There are a range of factors which may contribute to satisfying or exceeding the expectations of a certain segment of customers, for the purpose of this paper two the relative importance of the service quality attributes will be examined in terms of customer satisfaction and loyalty These issues will be examined for the branded coffeehouses, since this segment of the market shows remarkable success in the past few years and this industry is widely considered as being extremely competitive and lucrative. This paper briefly attempts to answer the question, “which quality attributes of service make the customers loyal to a certain coffeehouse brand and rank higher than the others in the customer‟s perception?”
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