Satisfaction during Delivery Process 5 Customer Satisfaction during the Service Delivery Process Peter J. Danaher University of Auckland, New Zealand, and Jan Mattsson University of Karlstad, Sweden Satisfaction versus Service Quality: Siamese Twins? To date service quality research has focused mainly on methods for monitoring operations to ensure conformance to specifications (operations perspective) and for measuring customer satisfaction (marketing perspective). Some well-known work from the latter stream of research is the development of the SERVQUAL instrument[1,2], that measures the gap between expectations and perceptions of the service by the customer, as an indication of service quality. Although this and other work in the area invoke the disconfirmation paradigm from consumer behaviour research, there seems to be considerable debate about the relationship between the core constructs of consumer satisfaction and perceived quality as well as about the appropriateness of the gap approach[3]. Evaluating their own contributions, Parasuraman et al. [4] found that the usefulness of analysing the expectations and gap scores remains unresolved. However, they maintain that customer satisfaction is distinct from service quality. Satisfaction is thought to result from the comparison between predicted service and perceived service, whereas service quality refers to the comparison between desired service and perceived service[5]. However, affective states[6] and perceived performance have been shown to be strong and direct determinants of both customer satisfaction[7] and service quality[8] of the service encounter. Another distinction between service quality and satisfaction has been suggested. The evaluation of individual service transactions has been termed satisfaction judgements. In contrast, the perceived service quality would be similar to an individual’s general attitude towards the service firm[9]. Although implying a close relationship between service encounter satisfaction and perceived service quality, too little attention has been paid to the measurement and nature of the satisfaction construct as it also fits the description of an attitude[10]. For instance, marketers have tended not to conceptualize satisfaction as a cognitively based evaluation of attributes found in other literatures but as an emotional response to a product or service use[11]. We have reason to believe that the summation of all the service encounters is evaluated by the customer and not just the interaction with the service provider. Therefore the process as such may play a greater role than the actual outcome in determining the overall satisfaction[12]. It has been suggested that there may European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 28 No. 5, 1994, pp. 5-16. © MCB University Press, 0309-0566 Received September 1993 Revised April 1994