Customer Satisfaction with Services

David E. Bowen

This entry provides an overview of some of the key scholarly developments in the area of customer satisfaction with services over the last 25 years. The service sector now dominates employment and gross domestic product figures for the United States and, more broadly, the economically developed world. However, this overview applies beyond the service sector, as some have argued that all firms are service businesses because manufactured goods are typically augmented by related services. Furthermore, increasing numbers of high-profile manufacturers, such as General Electric and ABB, aspire to increase their percentage of revenues from services. Contemporary academic interest in services—conceptualizing services and related theory building, as well as how to measure customer satisfaction with services—blossomed during the late 1970s (as opposed to much earlier definitions and commentary on service in organizational sociology and economics). The emergent interest focused on how goods differed from services and grew out of a multidisciplinary ...

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