Customers’ zone of tolerance for retail stores

Abstract

The present study describes the zone of tolerance for customers' service expectations and determines their satisfaction level for retail stores. It attempts to diagnose the service quality level of customers' in retail store setting. A conceptual model RETZOT is presented in this study, and the results demonstrate that evaluation of services can be scaled according to different types of expectations-'desired' and 'adequate'-and that customers use these two types of expectations as a comparison standard in evaluating retail store services. The findings reveal that customers have a narrow zone of tolerance with regards to the services provided by retail stores.

Diagnosing the impact of retail bank customers’ perceived justice on their service recovery satisfaction and post-purchase behaviours: an empirical study in financial centre of middle east

“…Intense competition makes customers more demanding and unlikely to forgive, so service recovery is more crucial than ever before (Nadiri, 2011). A service failure is defined as 'any service-related mishaps or problems that occur during a consumer's experience with the firm' (Maxham, 2001, p. 11).…”

Applying the fuzzy SERVQUAL method to measure the service quality in certification & inspection industry

“…For measuring the service quality, a 22-item questionnaire instrument called SERVQUAL was proposed by Parasuraman et al [1]. Since then, the SERVQUAL questionnaire has been used to analyze service quality within diverse organizations, such as retailing organizations [2], airline industry [3], restaurants [31], hotel [4,23,33], higher education [5,26], urban transportation [6,7], public or private health care [8,9,10,11,27,35], information system [12], e-learning [14], hot spring industry [13,37], condominium management [28,32], Internet service [14,24,29,36], supply chain [15], banking [16]; [21], logistics industry [17], alcohol treatment [34], enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems [18], library [30], telecommunication sector [5], tourism industry [19], online travel agencies [22], after-sale Service in Manufacturing [25], public service [20], crisis and emergency management [38], and so on. But SERVQUAL has not been applied to certification & inspection industry so far.…”

Diez tipos de expectativas

“…• Enfoque de niveles: las definiciones establecen distintos niveles de expectativas admitidos por los clientes en la evaluación del servicio (Miller, 1977;Parasuraman, Berry & Zeithaml, 1991;Higgs et al, 2005;Nadiri, 2011;Parasuraman, 2011). …”

“…Resultado de esta estructuración en distintos niveles de expectativas, el cliente considera el mejor nivel de servicio posible -expectativas deseadas-, el nivel mínimo tolerable -expectativas adecuadas-y una zona comprendida entre estos dos tipos de expectativas, denominada zona de tolerancia Nadiri, 2011, Parasuraman, 2011. En la tabla 4 se presenta un resumen de este enfoque de niveles.…”

“…También existe un mínimo tolerable, las expectativas adecuadas, y reflejan el mínimo nivel que un consumidor considera que debe ser esperado de calidad de servicio Zeithaml et al, 1993;Nadiri, 2011).…”