Interesting Results
Serving Customers Around the World
A recently published study examines how service quality, the environment in which a service is delivered, and the quality of the physical product delivered in the service setting affect customer intentions to continue purchasing from fast food operators and grocery retailers in eight different countries. The researchers found that the relative importance of these factors varied to a surprisingly large extent both between the two types of services studied and among the different countries studied. In particular, this and previous studies have shown that the quality of the physical product has a strong influence on future purchase intentions for US consumers, but this study showed that this is not the case in some other countries. In India, there was a negative relationship between the quality of the physical product delivered in fast food restaurants and future purchase intentions, while in Sweden and the Netherlands it had no influence. Morocco was the only one of the countries studied besides the United States for which the quality of the physical product delivered by grocery retailers influenced intentions to continue purchasing from the same retailer.