THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SERVICE QUALITY AND CUSTOMER SATISFACTION: AN EMPIRICAL CASE

The relationship between quality and satisfaction is characterized by a strong conceptual and managerial evolution. On the one hand, quality is the antecedent of the customer satisfaction, but on the other hand, it more and more frequently coincides with the customer satisfaction itself, although they differ conceptually. However, without the satisfied customer, quality does not exist. Actually, the first assumption that must be taken into account concerns the presence of an absolute relationship of integration between the two concepts, as empirically pointed out in this paper. If customer satisfaction is pursued in a quality-oriented approach, the chances of making the customer satisfied raise. The research aims at studying the level of gap between expected and perceived quality, as well as verifying the existence of a relationship of dependence between quality and satisfaction. As the research develops in the field of services, the objective is to study the impact that the five dimensions of ServQual have on customers' satisfaction, paying special attention to the factors which measure "functional quality", that is the quality of the human relationship between customer and provider. For this purpose a statistical approach based on an empirical analysis was used. A questionnaire was administered to collect data and both descriptive and multivariate statistical tools were applied in order to analyze data.