A study on the customers' service perception and roles of quality factors

Service quality is very important to marketers and consumers in that it has many strategic benefits in contributing to profitability of marketing activities and consumers' problem-solving activities. Moreover, despite the phenomenal growth of physical fitness centers little research has focused on the evaluation of service quality from exercisers' perspectives. The major purpose of this article is to explore the concept of two-factor model and its influences on exerciser's perception of quality. This article attempts to achieve its purpose by (1) classifying critical service attributes into hygiene factors and satisfiers (2) measuring the relative importance of need criteria, (3) evaluating SERVPERF model and SERVQUAL model in service sector and (4) identifying the relationship between overall satisfaction and behavior. In explaining the relationship between perceived performance and overall satisfaction only 27 out of original 33 survey items appeared to be statistically significant. Hence a penalty–reward analysis was performed on three critical attributes to find out 11 satisfiers and 9 hygiene factors. In addition, it was found that only experience-based norms (SERVPERF model) were more appropriate then expectations to serve as a benchmark against which service experiences were compared (SERVQUAL model). However it must be noted that the degree of association with overall satisfaction was not consistent.