How service customers tidy their service quality perceptions

Abstract

A system dynamics simulation model shows the interdependence of strategy and performance in a typical service company. Computed with the model, decision scenarios trace the firm’s sinister service quality dynamics to the inauspicious blunder of pulling on internal policy levers too hard. The resulting dysfunctional behavior jolts the entire service organization, including its customers, defectors and profit per customer metric. As a method for modeling service organizations, system dynamics provides the integrated process required for comprehending self-inflicted problems in services. Along with insights toward effective and productive service quality design, management and performance, the model’s simulation results also unveil the morphology of a likely topology, showing how service customers might aptly tidy their perceptions of good and poor service quality. These results urgently call for service quality research, aimed at effective and productive, customer-centric service quality design and management that entail high-quality service production, delivery and consumption processes.