Description:
<jats:sec><jats:title content-type="abstract-heading">Purpose</jats:title><jats:p>– The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the critical role that context plays in measuring service quality.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type="abstract-heading">Design/methodology/approach</jats:title><jats:p>– This study replicated an experiment methodology to show that customers perceive an airline service drama as a sequence of scenes. A series of focus groups were then conducted to identify the context-specific set of service quality expectations that customers hold for each of these scenes. Finally, Formal Concept Analysis (FCA), a mathematical modeling technique, was applied to these findings to graphically illustrate how customer expectations for airline service quality vary by service scene.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type="abstract-heading">Findings</jats:title><jats:p>– Results from this study indicate that static measures of service quality are apparently inadequate in explaining customer expectations during more enduring service encounters. The FCA hierarchical model developed in this study revealed profound differences in customer service expectations across the six airline service scenes. These results suggest that more advanced methods for measuring service quality are necessary for service encounters that are longer in duration.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type="abstract-heading">Research limitations/implications</jats:title><jats:p>– This research brings into question a broad spectrum of research which fails to recognize that customers use different reference points in time to evaluate service quality.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type="abstract-heading">Practical implications</jats:title><jats:p>– Researchers and practitioners need accurate and reliable measures of service quality but the findings suggests that measurement specificity and diagnostic capability should not be sacrificed in the pursuit of more robust instruments.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type="abstract-heading">Originality/value</jats:title><jats:p>– This is the first study to empirically demonstrate that customers perceive the airline service encounter as a sequence of scenes. It is also the first study to mathematically model service quality dimensions using FCA.</jats:p></jats:sec>