EXPECTATIONS OF SERVICE QUALITY AS AN INDUSTRIAL MARKET-SEGMENTATION VARIABLE

This article describes a service quality study within a business-to-bu siness environment and focuses on the use of expectations of service q uality as a market segmentation tool, It is demonstrated that differen t members of buying centres have different expectations of the quality of service for a high-tech product and it is suggested that industria l 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 o f customer expectations means fewer managerial insights.