Some recent studies have shown that culture influences how consumers perceive service quality. Others have shown the relationship between perceived service quality and behavioral intentions. In this article, the authors study how culture influences behavioral intentions toward services on the basis of services marketing and cross-cultural psychology literature. They tested and found that customers from cultures with lower individualism or higher uncertainty avoidance tend to have a higher intention to praise if they received superior service. On the other hand, the same groups tend not to switch, give negative word of mouth, or complain even if they received poor service quality. Customers from cultures with higher individualism or lower uncertainty avoidance tend to switch, engage in negative word of mouth, or complain if they received poor service quality. But they do not tend to praise when they received superior service. Managerial implications, contribution, and future research directions are also discussed.

The authors argue that perceptions of service quality vary across cultural groups, as defined by each culture's position on Hofstede's dimensions. They explicitly map the relationship between service quality perceptions and cultural dimension positions and draw the implications for international service market segmentation. They also test the hypotheses constituting their theoretical analysis. They show that the importance of SERVQUAL dimensions is correlated with Hofstede's cultural dimensions. They also used the correlation coefficients to compute a Cultural Service Quality Index that could be used to segment international service markets and allocate resources across segments.In 1994, Anderson and Fornell proposed "a customer satisfaction research prospectus" in the concluding chap-ter of the book on service quality edited by Rust and Oliver. One of the research questions they suggested was the investigation of systematic variation in satisfaction across nations. More specifically, they asked, "How does culture affect the level of satisfaction?" The answer to this question, they argued, would have important implications on how firms might allocate resources in different parts of the global economy. Since Anderson and Fornell asked their question, the relationship between culture and service quality/satisfaction has received increasing interests as suggested by the recent articles by Winsted (1997), Donthu andYoo (1998), andMattila (1999). These studies began to establish the links between cultural dimensions and service quality dimensions by studying a subset of possible relationships. In this article, we provide and test a conceptual link between all five cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede (1980Hofstede ( , 1991 and variations in the relative importance of all five service quality dimensionsThe authors thank Luis Toral and Gui Rakotoarijaonina from the University of Neuchâtel for collecting data in Switzerland.

Models of perceived service quality traditionally have measured consumers’ expectations of a service provider before a service encounter and used these preencounter expectations, along with service performance, to predict and explain consumers’ perceptions of service quality. However, there exists considerable evidence suggesting that consumers’expectations continuously change during a service encounter. The present study proposes a real-time updating (RTU) model of perceived service quality that accounts for the intraencounter changes in consumers’ expectations. The article presents experimental data that demonstrate support for the RTU model and suggest that updated expectations are better predictors of perceived service quality than are preencounter expectations or service delivery. These findings suggest that consumers’ perceptions of service quality are heavily based on updated expectations; therefore, intraencounter management of consumers’expectations is deserving of increased attention from researchers and practitioners.

Drawing on research from design science, marketing and service science, our paper provides an integrated framework for evaluating and directing innovative service design. The main goal of our review is to highlight the strengths of existing frameworks and to suggest how they can be enhanced in combination with design science principles. Based on our review, we propose a new framework for the design of innovative services that integrates several key paradigmatic approaches and identifies fundamental open research questions. Our approach is unique as it combines three service disciplines, namely services marketing, service science, and design science, and provides a new framework that describes step by step the procedure that needs to be taken and the conditions that need to be met for developing innovative services. We believe that providing such a framework is a valuable addition to the literature.

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