| Along with the development of economic globalization and information technology, the industrial structure has taken great changes; and the scale of the services sector has expanded at an unprecedented rate. Along with rising output ratio and increasing share of employment of the global service industry, service sector in economic activities gradually has occupied a dominant position as the impact of an important force for world economic development. Therefore, the service is not only the engine of a country and socio-economic growth, but also an important indicator of a country or region's economic modernization. At present, the development of service industry in China has also been enhanced; and its status in the national economy is strengthening and expanding. The service industry has played an important role in promoting steady economic development and enlarging employment. But there also exist some problems in the industry development. Our service quality is one of them, which can not be neglected. The service quality is not satisfactory due to the lack of clear service standards and specifications in the service industry. Especially in recent years, the overall level of service development is stagnant. As far as the world is concerned, service sector accounts for more than 60% of the domestic GDP in average. The ratio is over 70% in major developed countries, and more than 43% even in middle-income and low-income countries, but in our country this ratio is only 40.1% in 2008. The reason lie.in three aspects:a short time development of China's service; service quality of various service industries have grown extremely uneven; Quality of the staff is low; the high rate of complaints; service satisfaction is low, which have strong impact on the balanced development of services sectorMany scholars believe that there are two reasons for our service quality low levels:one is the service quality is not stable. As the U.S. service marketing experts Zeithaml and M.Bitner believe:" purchased of service is more difficult in evaluation and selection than the actual goods, in part because service is not intangible and standardized and partly because service production and consumption is tightly connected together". The second reason is that the enterprises take mistaken measures in improving service quality; these efforts can not increase fundamentally customer satisfaction although it costs a lot. So, what measures should be taken for the enterprise to improve service quality actually? In what extent the relative effect of interaction quality of different service categories impacts on customer satisfaction? These problems need solving urgently.1,Research contentThis research focuses on investigating the relative effect of each service Interactive quality dimension, such as personnel interaction quality and environment interaction quality, on customer satisfaction based on different service categories.According to Dwyer, Schurr and Oh, the services are classified into tow categories:transactional service and relational service. By testing our propositions in two service contexts, one transactional (fast-food restaurant) and one relational (hair salon), we aim to enhance the validity of our model, which refers to the relative effect of interaction quality of different service categories on customer satisfaction.According to Chen and Drury's model, named as CAMSE interaction, the dimensions of the service interaction quality are classified into tow categories: personnel interaction quality and environment interaction quality.The thesis is composed by six chapters:The first chapter, as an introduction, mainly introduces the research background, purposes of the study, as well as significance and methods of the research.The second chapter is literature review. It mainly reviews previous studies on the service quality, service classification and customer satisfaction, which provide theoretical support for this study.Based on the literature review, the third chapter of this research proposes four hypotheses and provides a conceptualization and establishes a theoretical analysis model and. The research of the whole model should be considered as the logical frame of the path analysis and theoretical analysis.Chapter four is the overall design of the implementation of the research, including the questionnaire investigation and the scheme. We analyze the variables in the model of operational definitions and measurement, introduce the design of the questionnaire and sampling, including study subjects and sampling methods; finally, and then demonstrate the research methods of data collection and data analysis. In order to make this study more reasonable and concise and improve the quality of questionnaire, we visit 10 research objects by interviewing method, and then we make the pre-research analysis of this study and draw on an empirical base of 50 customer questionnaires in multiple scales, which tests the reliability and validity of the small sample.The fifth chapter is dedicated to the statistics and the analysis of the questionnaires. Firstly, we provide a detailed descriptive analysis in the samples of two industries with SPSS 15.0 software. Secondly, we estimate the reliability and validity of the data of questionnaire in three scales (service personnel interaction quality scale, service environment interaction quality scale, customer satisfaction scale). Thirdly, we prove the model and the hypothesis mentioned in the previous chapter with the structural equation model in the AMOS7.0 software. Following that, we testify the overall model fitting, do path analysis, and then discuss which dimension in the model is the most important influential factor. Finally, we reveal the relationship between interaction quality and customer satisfaction after the analysis of the service category as a moderator.The sixth chapter is the summary of the current research, including the conclusions, limitations and recommendations of this research.2. Research conclusionBased on the empirical research in the thesis, the author concludes that:(1) The interaction quality between customers and personnel has a direct positive impact on the customer satisfaction;(2) The interaction quality between customers and environment has a direct positive impact on customer satisfaction;(3) The service category moderates the relative salience of interaction quality and customer satisfaction;(4) In transactional service, the environment interaction quality is more important; while, in relational service, the personnel interaction quality is more important. 3. Research contributionsThe main contribution of this research is a combination of academic and practical level, In terms of the academic significance, the service category as a moderator to study the. relationship between interaction quality and customer satisfaction and establish a model to test the difference in different categories of service. At the practical level, it aims to identify the impact of different categories of service enterprises on customer satisfaction, as well as the main factors influential to customer satisfaction. The research enables service enterprises to improve business performance, create competitive advantage and enhance the quality of services of different enterprises with intent to enhance the level of customer satisfaction.4. Research limitations(1) This study only investigates the customers of fast food service and hairdressing service, thus the application of the analysis results needs to be further verified. The database could be enlarged by involving other samples, such as medical care, vehicle maintenance, consulting and other professional services, which can better examine the characteristics of the service interactive quality.(2) The sample comes from the same service category, which includes different enterprises. It is possible to produce the variety of evaluation criteria from customers in different enterprises, which have influence on the measure of satisfaction. This factor may affect the research results; a single indicator to measure customer satisfaction could meet the requirements of this study, but if we use the multi-index to measure, it may increase the reliability of the results.(3) The sampling limitation also exists. Most of the samples of this study come from students which can not fully show the whole model. |
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