Service encounter problems: which service providers are more likely to be blamed?
Charlene Pleger Bebko
Professor of Marketing, Indiana University of Pennsylvania,
Eberly College of Business and Information Technology, Indiana,
Pennsylvania, USA
Keywords Service operations, Customer satisfaction, Perception, Consumer attitudes
Abstract Looks at unmet customer expectations in service delivery associated with
service encounter problems. Problematic service encounters are compared to those which
were problem free. Four services were evaluated by customers ± legal consultation, hair
stylist, film processing and retail store. These services covered a range of both process
and outcome tangibility. Expectations, perceptions and the ``gaps’’ between them were
used to evaluate service quality across a range of service encounters. If problems were
reported, customers were asked to evaluate three attribution factors: who was at fault for
the problem, could it have been prevented and could it occur in future service encounters.
These findings indicate that when there is a service encounter problem, and that service
has some level of intangibility,unmet customer expectations are significantly greater than
in services with some level of tangibility. Suggests how service providers might prevent
customer perceptions of service quality from significantly diverging from customer