On the Service Quality and Satisfaction Relationship: The Moderating Role of Consumer Entitlement

While the study of service quality and its impact on customer satisfaction has a rich history within the services marketing literature, there have been recent calls for research that provides a deeper understanding of this relationship, given its fundamental role in ensuring outcomes such as customer retention and profitability (Anderson 2007). This research study seeks to add to the literature by exploring the role of an under-researched construct known as consumer entitlement on the service quality-satisfaction relationship. Using a sample of season ticket holders of a professional sports franchise, this study hypothesized and found that consumer entitlement moderates the service quality-satisfaction relationship such that higher levels of consumer entitlement mitigate the positive impacts of service quality on satisfaction.

This study’s sample consists of season ticket holders, who generally receive special treatment in exchange for their loyalty and the revenue from their patronage. Their status would suggest a potentially high degree of consumer entitlement in this customer group. Given the heavily expectation-influenced nature of service quality and satisfaction assessments, it seems quite likely that consumer entitlement would play a moderating role in the service quality-satisfaction relationship. Since entitled consumers expect a higher level of service, it is likely that their satisfaction level will be less positively affected by high levels of perceived service quality than less entitled consumers.

As hypothesized, this moderated relationship was found to be significant. Vital to the finding is the implication that, for highly entitled consumers, the importance of service quality to their ultimate satisfaction appears to be somewhat diminished. Given the recent increase in a general sense of entitlement (Trzesniewski et al. 2008), we must question the vital role of service quality in the creation and maintenance of customer satisfaction.

Surprisingly, at low levels of service quality, entitled consumers realized higher levels of satisfaction than their less entitled peers. This may be due to a higher level of self-confidence in entitled consumer’s decision-making ability. An alternate, though related, possibility could be that there is an escalation of commitment at play, since the sample surveyed consists of season ticket holders. When making an investment of this magnitude, an artificially high self-opinion could lead customers with high entitlement to report being more satisfied than service quality would have otherwise warranted. Taken as a whole, these findings add credence to the assertion that the presence of high levels of service quality may no longer be enough to directly impact customer satisfaction. However, low levels of service quality may still be sufficient to result in dissatisfaction. If our results are an indication of the future, marketers would be wise to proactively determine strategies for maintaining relationships with, and keeping the attention and interest of, entitled consumers.