engleski

An Inquiry into Service Quality, Customer Satisfaction and Bahavioural Intentions Relationships

In an increasingly volatile and competitive environment, improvement of service delivery processes and achieving higher levels of customer satisfaction becomes of paramount importance. It is within this context that questions related to understanding the concept of perceived service quality and its relations to customer satisfaction and behavioural intentions once again arise as an area in which important theoretical contributions and practical insights can be presented. The concept of perceived service quality as well as its linkage to concept of customer satisfaction and consumers’ behavioural intentions has long been a source of vigorous debate in academic community. While collectively recognising the importance of research and understanding of this concept for successful management of service enterprise resources, authors have taken a wide variety of courses in their approaches toward conceptualising, operationalizing and measuring this concept. Seminal studies on establishing content and structure of service quality concept, and claims of its universal applicability were followed by re-examinations and extensions which resulted in findings indicating a need for adaption of the concept to differing service settings. More precisely – the need for adaption of the most prevailing – Servqual scale to particularities of various service industries was recognised. This resulted in further investigation of variations of service quality concept in a range of service industries, one of them being hospitality. Although studies employing Servqual and Servqualbased scales in hospitality industry have been relatively limited in number, their contribution was important as they provided insights which allowed for better understanding of dynamics of service quality construct across service industries. Additional important route of enquiry has been focused on linkage of perceived service quality to customer satisfaction and causal links to behavioural intentions. In an attempt to expand the body of knowledge on this subject, this paper provides an application of an adapted service quality measure in hotel setting in Croatia. Through application of PLS path modelling an analysis of empirical data and comparison of findings with the results of preceding studies, major areas of divergence from predominant conceptualisation of service quality –satisfaction – behavioural intentions chain are identified and implications of these findings for management of service operations in hospitality are discussed. Finally, limitations of this research coupled with potential areas of interest for future research are identified.

Services marketing, Service quality, Satisfaction, Consumer behaviour

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