Can Customer Expectations be Measured in Real Time?

Abstract

Customer expectation has been an important issue across different academic fields. Customer expectation management enables service providers to provide customers with suitable services in order to achieve high customer satisfaction especially in real-time dynamic service contexts. Understanding actual customer expectations is the primary step before managing customer expectations. However, to our knowledge, there is no research investigating how to measure real-time customer expectations during service delivery. Hence, this study proposes a customer expectation measurement mechanism and evaluates its feasibility and reliability through simulations. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism offers researchers and service providers a feasible approach to measuring and managing real-time customer expectations at service encounters for building satisfactory customer experiences.