Customer Service Quality, Satisfaction, and Operational Performance: A proposed model for Australian public aquatic centres

While profitability and shareholder return often represent the overall success of commercial organisations, the performance of public aquatic centres tends to include, amongst other criteria, the number of customers that visit the centre, and the fit between customers and the local community profile. Retention of current customers and attracting new customers therefore should be a major issue for centre operators and owners. This paper provides data on Australian public aquatic centres that highlight the relationships between retention of customers and their willingness to recommend the centre, and measures of service quality, problem resolution and overall satisfaction. These relationships are often represented in generic service quality models. This paper proposes amending an existing model to include contextual variables that further clarify the relationships between such variables and operational performance in public aquatic centres. This enhanced model of service quality also provides a framework to highlight the diagnostic value of longitudinal data from 1999 to 2001 and 2003 to 2005. In turn, examples of industry benchmarks are offered for groupings of public aquatic centres against which centre operators can compare the performance of their centre. The contribution of the paper is therefore twofold. First, a proposed model that represents key operational relationships at Australian public aquatic centres. Second, an initial overview is conducted of the type of data currently available for use in future testing of the model.