Abstract
In the service industry, when providers generate a high level of customer satisfaction, they can gain and maintain a major competitive advantage in the marketplace. This competitive advantage can, in turn, lead directly to high profitability and growth. In the present competitive consumer landscape, world, shopping malls must deliver high-quality service to customers given that as a service ecosystem the mall must optimize its own resources and the resources of others to improve both its own circumstances and those of others. Against this general background, in this study, we assess the quality attributes of a food court located in a shopping mall by identifying factors related to the shopping mall—ambience, food variety, convenience, the tenants in the food court, food quality, food price, and restaurant staff. A descriptive analysis and a multivariate analysis, including structural equation modeling, are performed using IBM SPSS and AMOS statistical software. The results of the factor analysis indicate that food quality, followed by convenience and food variety, is the most important factor driving customer satisfaction. The results highlight the importance of networks between different stakeholders in such an ecosystem and provide developers and service providers with information in regard to the attributes most implicated in predicting customer satisfaction in a food court. On this basis, customers are viewed not only as evaluators but also as partners in producing service.
Highlights
The retail environment of a shopping mall can be considered a service ecosystem (Yiu & Yau, 2006)
That is, shopping malls are governed by the service-dominant logic as that governing a service ecosystem, the latter of which is defined as a ―relatively self-contained, self-adjusting system of resource-integrating actors connected by shared institutional arrangements and mutual value creation through service exchange‖ (Vargo & Lusch, 2016, p. 161)
Given that value co-creation through a service-for-service exchange is at the very heart of the shopping mall, we focus on the exchange that occurs in shopping mall food courts with a goal of identifying the service-quality attributes that are most important in driving customer satisfaction
Summary
The retail environment of a shopping mall can be considered a service ecosystem (Yiu & Yau, 2006). That is, shopping malls are governed by the service-dominant logic as that governing a service ecosystem, the latter of which is defined as a ―relatively self-contained, self-adjusting system of resource-integrating actors connected by shared institutional arrangements and mutual value creation through service exchange‖ The service-dominant (S-D) logic provides a narrative of value cocreation that is coordinated through actor-generated institutions, institutional arrangements, a service ecosystem, actors, resource integration and service-for-service exchange. In this context, the defining value of a shopping mall is the interactions that contribute to the value co-creation process. The greater the breadth of products and services available, the greater the range of situations in which consumers recall and consider the retailer (Keller, 2003), and, the more salient the retailer which is the most basic building block for establishing a brand (Keller, 2003)
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