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Most research on service quality and customer satisfaction in the public sector has focused on the measurement of service quality and indicators for customer satisfaction survey. However, few research has been done on developing a unitive model describing the factors affecting customer satisfaction. The purpose of this study is to offer a customer satisfaction model which incorporates wait time as a new variable affecting the customer's affective response.
This new conceptual model integrates key variables derived from recent studies of service quality and customer satisfaction. Also incorporated are relevant constructs from the extant services literature, including the role of the disconfirmation of a customer's waiting time expectation, waiting costs, controllability of the cause, and the waiting environment. Data from actual customers queuing at a county office in Seoul are used to test the theoretical framework. Analysis of data, with the use of multiple regression analyses, demonstrates a strong pattern of support for the hypotheses, confirming the important role of wait time management in customer satisfaction.
This study shows that there is a strong correlation between wait time and a customer's affective response. As customer satisfaction is, in turn, related strongly to service quality and affective response, the customer's affective response is essentially a "mediator" between wait time and service quality. Furthermore, this study has found that while the role of the disconfirmation of a customer's waiting time expectation and waiting environment are supported, waiting costs and controllability of the cause are not. Future studies may include more variables such as prior service encounter, acceptability of waits, etc. to investigate factors affecting customer satisfaction.
