Provider Gaps

The Customer Gap: The Gap between Customer Expectations and Customer Perceptions

The customer gap is the difference between customer expectations and customer perceptions. Customer expectation is what the customer expects according to available resources and is influenced by cultural background, family lifestyle, personality, demographics, advertising, experience with similar products and information available online (Tan & Coster, 2006). Customer expectation often consists of what a customer believes should or will happen (Zeithaml et al. 2013). Customer perception is totally subjective and is based on the customer’s interaction with the product or service. Perception is derived from the customer’s satisfaction of the specific product or service and the quality of service delivery. The customer gap is the most important gap and in an ideal world the customer’s expectation would be almost identical to the customer’s perception (Tan & Coster, 2006).

In a customer orientated strategy, delivering a quality service for a specific product should be based on a clear understanding of the target market (Tan & Coster, 2006). Understanding customer needs and knowing customer expectations is critical to delivering quality services, as it forms the basis for the gaps model and could be the best way to close the gap (Zeithaml et al. 2013).

Those people should be well-managed and well-prepared before they could provide an effective recovery. obviously, frontline employees play a critical role in addressing customer dissatisfaction after a service failure occurs, and this accentuate the importance of examining employee’s service recovery performance. Understanding factors which influence frontline employees efforts in response to service failures is important in order to minimize the negative effect on organizational effectiveness and quality of services given to customers.