Effects of culture on service quality and customer satisfaction ratings

The purpose of this study was to examine how national culture and nationality relate to service quality and customer satisfaction evaluations among international and local Taiwanese guests with different cultural backgrounds. The sample size was comprised of 344 customers of the Cosby Saloon from the United States, Germany, Japan, and Taiwan. Respondents were asked to rate their evaluations of service quality and overall customer satisfaction toward Cosby Saloon through self-administered questionnaires written in the language of the customer. The reason for selecting customers from these four countries is because Eastern and Western countries are strongly contrasting in three of Hofstede's five dimensions of national culture: Power Distance, Individualism, and Confucian Dynamism. The instruments include perceptions of service quality, overall customer satisfaction, national culture, and respondent's background information. The original instrument in English was translated into Chinese, Japanese, and German using parallel translation (committee translation) method. A pilot study was conducted to test clarity of the instruments.; Overall service quality was found to be related to power distance of national culture and nationality in the full model. Although significant, the relationship is quite weak. In the part model (nationality variable removed), overall service quality was found to be related to individualism of national culture. In the full model, only nationality was found to be a significant predictor of overall customer satisfaction. In the part model (nationality variable removed), however, Confucian dynamism is a significant predictor of overall customer satisfaction.; Canonical correlation analysis revealed that customers from the Western countries (the United States and Germany) tended to have higher scores on all five dimensions of service quality, as compared to scores of customers from the Eastern countries represented in the sample (Japan and Taiwan). The results of Tukey's HSD post-hoc comparison showed that American customers had significantly higher scores on overall service quality than Japanese and Taiwanese. German customers had significantly higher scores on overall service quality than Japanese. In overall customer satisfaction, the US customers had significantly higher scores than Japanese customers. Further, Taiwanese customers had significantly higher scores than Japanese customers.