A model beyond generic quality models for academic libraries

A compelling argument raised by Bolton and Oliver, states that only customers’ assessment of continuously provided services, which may depend on performance-only evaluation, deserves attention. As libraries are services provided continuously and considered in general to be a public service, it is important to research this issue. Thus this paper discusses four research problems based on quality domains, overall customer satisfaction, quality paradigm and the causality in the area of academic libraries in Sri Lanka. The paper concludes that the overall customer satisfaction is related to both satisfaction ratings in the form of gap scores and performance-only scores of quality domains, although the relationship between overall satisfaction and quality domains based on gap scores was weak, indicating statistical non-significance. The performance-only paradigm was found to be a statistically better paradigm, which produced significantly better predictors of overall customer satisfaction than the disconfirmation paradigm. Thus, all individual service quality domains, except Web services, were significant predictors of overall customer satisfaction in libraries. The study produced a final model based on the performance-only paradigm, with a linear relationship between customer satisfaction and service quality constructs in university libraries in Sri Lanka. THE PROBLEM There is a consensus among service marketing researchers on the causal sequence/order of the concepts of customer satisfaction and service quality. Through conceptual improvement and empirical findings of past studies, most researchers have concurred on the fact that quality judgments cause satisfaction, leading to the finding on service quality being the antecedent of customer satisfaction. The formation of satisfaction in relation to service quality is generally based on two significant theories identified in the literature–that is, performance-only and expectancy disconfirmation. Accordingly, it recognised two dominant theoretical paradigms, disconfirmation and performance-only, which can be duly used for modelling customer satisfaction through the service quality perspective in organisations, enabling them to perform possible customer-led service quality evaluations. However, a compelling argument raised by Bolton and Oliver (1989), cited in Bolton in Drew (1991),