Abstract:
Nowadays, the awareness of service firms’ managers about the crucial role of customers in the success or failure of their business has increased. This has led them to this fact that the best strategy for surviving in the marketplace is encouraging customers’ prosocial behaviors in service delivery process. Reasonably, one of the best strategies to encourage customers toward these behaviors is service delivering quality. Despite the importance of this issue, marketing researchers have not investigated the effect of customers’ perceived service quality on their prosocial behaviors yet. The current study aims to bridge this research gap. Hence, a sample consisting of 381 customers of passenger transportation agencies (ground transportation), in the city of Shiraz, by convenient method were selected and surveyed. In addition, based on the theoretical framework of the research variables, the conceptual model was proposed. Finally, structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test the hypotheses and it was found that the customers' perception of service quality, through affecting their satisfaction, can be reflected in their prosocial responses toward the agency. Furthermore, the customers' perception of setting and staff's dimension of service quality respectively have more positive effect on their satisfaction.
Machine summary:
Finally, structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test the hypotheses and it was found that the customers' perception of service quality, through affecting their satisfaction, can be reflected in their prosocial responses toward the agency.
By reviewing the prior research on service quality in this industry, it can be seen that most of their focus is on the attitudinal issues (Chen, 2008; Han, Hamb, Yang & Baek, 2012; Lai & Chen, 2011; Chang & Yang, 2008; Eboli & Mazzulla, 2007; Park, Robertson & Wu, 2004; Gilbert & Wong, 2003; Yang, Hsieh, Li & Yang, 2012), a very few of them have investigated passengers’ unfavorable behaviors (Rhoden, Ralston & Ineson, 2008; Cheng-Huaa & Hsin-Li, 2012) and despite the apparent importance of this issue, none of them have studied passengers’ prosocial behaviors.
According to previous studies, customers' satisfaction of services that are provided by passenger transportation agencies leads to their behavioral intention (Lai & Chen, 2011; Chen, 2008; Park, Robertson & Wu, 2004), favorable image about the firm (Park, Robertson & Wu, 2004), revisit intention (Han, Hamb, Yang & Baek, 2012), positive word of mouth, and their loyalty intention (Anand & Selvaraj, 2012).
Also, this research referred to the previous studies to measure the variables; in other words, to measure the service quality in passenger transportation agencies according to Chang and Yang (2008), the three dimensions of setting, staff and performance were used.
Conclusions & Suggestions The aim of this research was to investigate the effect of service quality in the passenger transportation agencies on the customer's prosocial behaviors.
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