Analyzing Customer Satisfaction According to Expectations Regarding Waiting Time in Service Receiving

Abstract

To provide good service, evaluations taken from the viewpoint of customers are necessary. Therefore, customer satisfaction is one of the important factors for evaluating service. Customer satisfaction is determined by the gap between the quality of service and customer expectations. Customer expectations change when customers obtain information about the service. Therefore, by showing information to customers relating to the service quality, providers can influence the heterogeneity of customers. This study aims to develop a methodology to analyze customer satisfaction with services. For this objective, we propose some service models. For the customer expectations model, customer expectations are calculated based on the information obtained in the process of the service. The service process model represents situations in service receiving. Through simulations on these models, customer expectations and quality of service can be calculated. To analyze the effects of showing information on customer satisfaction, this paper calculates the customer satisfaction regarding waiting time through simulations using the case of the Stands Café, an actual café located in the terminal station in Tokyo. For the simulation, we build a service process model for the café and we model customer expectations representing service situations. The situations include how many other customers are in the café, what those customers order and whether providers inform customers about waiting time or not. Six conditions are simulated: three patterns of rate of orders and two patterns of interval of customers coming to the café. From the result of the simulations, the effects of the interaction on customer satisfaction are analyzed.