Customer satisfaction and service quality

One of the original and most innovative sport marketers was American Bill Veeck, a leader in sports promotion in the 1960s. A sport product is defined as ‘any bundle or combination of qualities, processes, and capabilities that a buyer expects will deliver wanted satisfaction’. Similar to all industries, sporting organisations have broadened their focus from internal product development and performance to include greater attention on external stakeholders, including attitudes towards the products consumed. As both service quality and customer satisfaction are attitudes or types of consumer evaluations, and therefore related constructs, they are often referred to in an interchangeable way. Service quality is a matter of perception, and two people who experience the same service may thus have very different perceptions of its quality. Developing high levels of customer satisfaction and retention requires management of three distinct processes: ‘designing the service product, designing the service environment, and delivering the service’.