Title: Redefining service quality scale with customer experience quality scale: a critical review

Authors: Atul Gupta

Addresses: Commerce Department, Hindu College, University of Delhi, Delhi-110007, India

Abstract: Service quality was originally conceptualised as a gap between expectations and the consumer's overall assessment of the service encounter. Service quality's most popular measure is SERVQUAL. Although it has been widely applied, SERVQUAL was found to have several limitations as a measure of customer experience. One of these is that its dimensions appear too limited to fully capture customer experience. Defining and improving customer experience is a growing priority for market research because experience is replacing quality as the competitive battleground for marketing. Customer experience has been conceptualised as the customer's subjective response to the direct and indirect encounter with the company. Experience quality is defined as the perceived excellence or superiority of the holistic encounter. Proposed study review gaps and limitations in SERVQUAL scale of service quality to redefine it with customer experience quality and review current literature on experience quality and its relationship with customer satisfaction, loyalty and word of mouth. No scale is widely accepted in the area of customer experience quality compared to widely used SERVQUAL scale. But scope of future research is there to develop more comprehensive and widely accepted scale.

Keywords: customer experience quality; EXQ; customer satisfaction; service experience; customer loyalty; service quality scale; SERVQUAL; word of mouth; WoM; India; retail banking; perceived value; bank services.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSOM.2016.078070

International Journal of Services and Operations Management, 2016 Vol.25 No.1, pp.48 - 64

Received: 15 May 2014
Accepted: 22 Jan 2015
Published online: 01 Aug 2016 *

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