| For decades, the concept of delivering quality service to ensure customer satisfaction in order to achieve customer loyalty and then gain repeat business has always been well recognized, accepted and practiced. However, recent research questions the returns on quality improvement and reveals that better service quality doesn't necessarily encourage customers to repeat their brand choices, but rather, true customer satisfaction does. The question arises as to what it is that ultimately determines customer satisfaction. This research argues that in addition to expectations and service quality as earlier literature suggested, customers' emotions and overall service experience ultimately affect customer satisfaction and, in turn, future purchase intention. We introduce service experience as a psychological recognition that is obtained by a customer undergoing the "service [quality]" through the lens of "expectations" with the influence of their "emotions." Such experience is subsequently used by the customer to form his sense of satisfaction for the service organization, as well as to form the expectations for future service encounters. We also introduce and distinguish customers' pre-, during-, and post-consumption emotions and examine their total, direct, and indirect effects on expectations, perceived service quality, and most importantly, overall service experience and customer satisfaction.; A survey asking about participants' most recent hotel experience was designed and conducted; and the data were analyzed using structural equation models (SEM). The results from this study supported our key hypotheses, including: (1) expectations and perceived service quality strongly influence customers' emotions; (2) emotions have a strong impact on the perception of service experience and customer satisfaction; and (3) service experience mediates the effects of expectations, service quality, and emotions on customer satisfaction, and serves as a key determinant of satisfaction as hypothesized. |
