FACTORS INFLUENCING CONSUMER DISSATISFACTION IN THE SERVICE INDUSTRY: A REVIEW

Abstract

Today’s consumers are more challenging because they are more educated and knowledgeable about their rights. Therefore, it is vital and essential to make sure that the consumers are satisfied when they are purchasing a product or using a service that is provided by firms or service providers. Understanding consumer satisfaction is important because consumer have varying ideas of what to expect from their experience (Harris, 2007).
Consumer dissatisfaction has been a significant interest to both academician and business world (Velazquez, Saura and Contri, 2007). From the business perspectives, the importance to understand the consumer satisfaction is because consumer is the reason for their existence (Valdani, 2009). There is assumption that the high qualities of service actually encourage satisfied guests to return for repeat visits to the same hotel and conversely low quality of service leads to low satisfaction, discouraging guests from returning (Carev, 2009).
One of the reasons for dissatisfaction is service failure. Service failures are critical incidents in consumer experience. Therefore, when there is a service failure, this can lead to dissatisfaction. Colgate and Norris (2001) added that service failure is a problem that a consumer has with a service. Weiner (2000) mentioned that, the level of dissatisfaction were likely to be higher if the guest encounter a service failure and did not see any effort made by the service provider in performing the recovery.