Expectations of Service Quality as an Industrial Market Segmentation Variable

This article describes a service quality study within a business-to-business environment and focuses on the use of expectations of service quality as a market segmentation tool. It is demonstrated that different members of buying centres have different expectations of the quality of service for a high-tech product and it is suggested that industrial marketers may wish to focus on these as an additional way of gaining customer insight for marketing strategy. While it has been insinuated in the literature that performance-based measures of service quality are statistically stronger, it is argued here that bypassing measures of customer expectations means fewer managerial insights.

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