MEASURING SERVICE QUALITY AND ITS EFFECTS ON CUSTOMER SATISFACTION: A STUDY ON THE FIVE-STAR HOTELS IN TURKISH REPUBLIC OF NORTHERN CYPRUS

Especially in today's world of high globalization and intense competition, the service sector has become one of the main areas where the companies may obtain significant competitive advantage (Hipp and Grupp, 2005). This may be done by improving the service quality in order to increase customer satisfaction, and the long term customer engagement. The service sector also constitutes an important part of the national economies, as an indicator of countrywide development and recovery (Wright, 2014). If the developmental trajectory of the service sector is investigated, it can be claimed that the position of the service sector in the economy has increased very rapidly during the last 30 years (Hipp and Grupp, 2005). As a result of the shift towards the service sector as an important part of the economy, the quality standards and applications that have been used for the production sector have started to be adapted to the service sector, in order to hold the service quality above a certain level to ensure customer satisfaction (Enderwick and Enderwick, 2013). At that point, it is apparent that the measures of success in the service sector are more abstract and intangible, when it is compared with the success indicators of the production sector, since service applications cannot be classified according to their physical and measurable properties as the way the production sector outcomes can be classified. Therefore, setting certain quality standards and measuring the customer feedback in an objective manner has even become more crucial for the service sector applications.