engleski

Perceptions of service quality formed by members of a retailer loyalty programme: exploration of differences

Ever since the advent of the smart loyalty cards, loyalty programmes have been transcending their traditional role as creators of exit barriers by transforming themselves into facilitators of customer data collection. Apart from demographic and socio-economic data, behavioural (transaction) as well as psychographic (survey) data are being collected for known entities (individual customers enrolled into a loyalty programme). An analysis based on a combination of these three types of data can be of immense value for service providers striving to improve service quality for different customer segments. The starting point for such endeavours can be the SERVQUAL model developed by Parasuraman et al. (1985, 1988, 1994), which defines five dimensions of service quality. Although adopted as the standard by many researchers in the field of service quality, the model has been subject to constant re-examination and criticism. These are due to the fact that the five-factor solution cannot be generalised (the number of distinct service quality dimension found in replication studies conducted in different service industries varies from one to nine). Our study does not classify as another attempt to prove the SERVQUAL generalisability. Using this model as a starting point, the study primarily focuses on the issue of loyalty programme members’ segmentation from the viewpoint of their perceptions of service quality. A sample of 201 retailer’ s loyalty programme members is used in the analysis. Three distinct service quality dimensions (personnel appearance, empathy and assurance) serve as input in the clustering process. For cluster profiling, selected demographic, socio-economic and transaction variables are used. Apart from methodological issues, managerial implications of findings are discussed in detail.

statistics; quality; consumer; loyalty; trade; services

nije evidentirano