Abstract
This chapter explains the overviews of customer service, service quality, and customer satisfaction; the significance of service quality in global business; and the significance of customer satisfaction in global business. Customer service is the significant element required for a successful business. Knowing customer expectations and delivering excellent service quality can considerably promote the entrepreneurial success and business growth. Gaining high levels of customer satisfaction is very important to business because satisfied customers are most likely to be loyal and to make repeat orders and to utilize a wide range of services offered by business. High service quality effectively promotes customer satisfaction and customer satisfaction has a positive relationship with business revenue. The chapter argues that promoting service quality and customer satisfaction has the potential to enhance organizational performance and reach strategic goals in global business.
TopBackground
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).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Customer Value: The difference between what a customer gets from a product, and what individual has to give in order to get it.
Customer Loyalty: The likelihood of previous customers to continue to buy from a specific organization.
Customer: A person who buys products or services.
Satisfaction: The customer level of approval when comparing a product’s perceived performance with his or her expectations.
Customer Service: All interactions between a customer and a product provider at the time of sale.
Customer Satisfaction: The degree of satisfaction provided by the products or services of a company as measured by the number of repeat customers.
Service: The product or service that is consumed by the end user and does not require any further processing.
Service quality: An assessment of how well a delivered service conforms to the client’s expectations.