RELATIONSHIP OF SERVICE QUALITY, FOOD QUALITY, PRICE, PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT AND CUSTOMER SATISFACTION: AN EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE OF A FAST FOOD RESTAURANT IN MALAYSIA

Abstract

Customer is known as an individual that purchased the goods or services that produced by an organization. Thus, attracting customers become a primary goal for the company because the customer is an important asset. In order to gain satisfaction from customers, the company really need to understand their needs and wants. Therefore, the objectives of the study are: (1) determine the relationship between service quality, food quality, price and physical environment and customer’s satisfaction and ii) examine the most significant factor that can affect customer’s satisfaction. For this study, 191 questionnaires were collected from 220 walk-in customers from a fast food restaurant. The findings revealed that service quality, food quality, price and physical environment have positive significant relationship that lead to customer’s satisfaction on the service provided by the fast food restaurant. The result indicates that the most significant factor that effect on customer satisfaction at the fast food restaurant is physical environment. Hence, customers are satisfied with the physical environment such as space, design, floor cleanliness, lighting, smell, noise, and air quality. Other than that, the restaurant’s atmosphere also influences customer satisfaction, such as music, setting, and decoration, which create a positive image of the restaurant in the minds of customers. The restaurant should maintain their physical environment, to provide distinctive customer experience in order to ensure them revisit the restaurant frequently. The implications of these findings suggest that the restaurant should focus more on its resources and also improving on service quality, food quality and price of the products which can lead to increasing the level of customer satisfaction.