Promoting Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction in Global Business

Background

In a service-dominant paradigm, service is the essence of society and industry (Chen, Huang, Shu, & Wang, 2013). Customer is the most important part of any business of the services sector (Huang & Huang, 2012; Lu & Yang, 2010). Customer value leads to the effective workgroup performance in the digital age (Kasemsap, 2013a). Getting information from three types of customers (i.e., online customers, offline customers, and multichannel customers) helps executives and marketing managers get a better understanding of the implications of the reduction of the personal interaction and the extent to which the consequences of failure of a single channel to deliver the specific service output vary across different types of customers (Fernandez-Sabiote & Roman, 2012).

Service quality has gained the significant attention in the last two decades (Ramanathan & Karpuzcu, 2011). Service quality is the antecedent of customer satisfaction (Caceres & Paparoidamis, 2007; Gorla, Somers, & Wong, 2010). Service quality and customer switching behavior are the important factors that affect the service companies' market share and profitability (Liang, Ma, & Qi, 2013). The relationship between the dimensions of service quality and customer satisfaction may exhibit a nonlinear pattern which means that paying more attention to a particular dimension of service quality may not always lead to the higher customer satisfaction (Kano, Seraku, Takahaski, & Tsuji, 1984).