Evaluating a Mechanism for Measuring Customer Expectation in Real-Time Service Contexts

Abstract

Customer expectation has been an important issue across different academic fields. Customer expectation management is a way for service providers to deliver appropriate services to customers in real-time service contexts in order to achieve high customer satisfaction. Understanding actual customer expectations is the primary step before managing customer expectations. However, to our knowledge, there is no research investigating how to measure customer expectations during service delivery, especially in real-time service contexts. Hence, this study aims to describe a customer expectation measurement mechanism and conduct several simulations to evaluate the feasibility and reliability of the customer expectation measurement mechanism. The simulation results show the mechanism is considerable for researchers and service providers and can serve as a feasible clue to measure and manage customer expectations in real-time service contexts.