The Role of Tangibility in Service Quality and its Impact on External Customer Satisfaction: A Comparative Study of Hospital and Hospitality Sectors

Posted: 31 Jul 2015

Date Written: July 30, 2015

Abstract

Customer satisfaction is a strategic goal of any organization, including service organizations. Various factors influence customer satisfaction — both external and internal. Response, assurance, tangibility, empathy and reliability are the five dimensions of service quality. Though these dimensions are found to be independent of each other, research on the relative importance of these dimensions on external customer satisfaction is of recent origin. In this research paper, an attempt is made to include both Operation-Based Tangibalization (OBT) and Marketing Based Tangibalization (MBT) and measure their impact on customer satisfaction. While other dimensions of service quality have significant influence on customer satisfaction, this research is driven primarily by analyzing and measuring the impact of tangibility on customer satisfaction across hospital and hospitality sector. The researcher has analyzed the components of tangibalization from existing literature and developed a structural model to test the importance of tangibalization on customer satisfaction. Application of Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) helps in measuring the tangibalization construct through a set of variables obtained from literature survey.