The relative importance of service features in explaining customer satisfaction: A comparison of measurement models

The purpose of this paper is to assess the relative importance of various service‐quality dimensions in explaining customer satisfaction; and to examine whether this assessment is affected by the measurement instrument that is used.

A new (“servicescape”) model for directly measuring the physical and the interactive features of a service is proposed and tested against the SERVQUAL measurement model and Nordic conceptualisation. Data are collected from a structured questionnaire survey of 434 passengers at the port of Piraeus in Greece.

The findings reveal that the widely used SERVQUAL instrument fails to fully capture the role of “tangibles” in determining overall customer satisfaction in the service under examination. The new proposed “servicescape model” attaches more importance to the role of physical environmental attributes than has been reported in most previous studies.

Service providers should pay more attention to the physical environment in which they are operating. They should also note that different measurement instruments provide different results.

This paper proposes and tests a new (“servicescape”) measuring instrument that has not been previously developed or operationalised.