The Zone of Tolerance: Exploring the Relationship between Service Transactions and Satisfaction with the Overall Service

This paper briefly reviews some of the literature on service quality and in particular the zone of tolerance, the zone of acceptable or expected outcomes in a service experience. The paper uses the zone of tolerance to explore the relationships between customers’ satisfaction with individual transactions, or service encounters, and their satisfaction with the overall service. Nine propositions are provided which identify how customers’ perceptions of the quality of a service can be influenced and how the thresholds of the zone of tolerance can be adjusted during the process of service delivery. The paper also considers some of the design implications of the propositions. INTRODUCTION Various models have been used and developed over the last ten years to explain satisfaction and service quality. The most widely used and accepted satisfaction theory arising from the consumer behaviour literature is the disconfirmation theory (see, for example, Churchill and Surprenant 1982, Woodruff et al 1985, Swan 1988, Tse and Wilton 1988, Oliver and DeSarbo 1988, Cooper et al 1989, Vezina and Nicosia 1990, Bolton and Drew 1991). The disconfirmation theory holds that satisfaction is related to the size of the disconfirmation experience, where disconfirmation is related to the person’s initial expectations (Churchill and Surprenant, 1982). This theory is very similar to the service quality model, found in the service management literature, which has been developed, most notably, by Berry et al (1985). This model is based on the view that service quality results from customers comparing their expectations prior to receiving service to their perceptions of the service experience itself. If a customer’s perceptions were matched by his/her expectations, then the customer is satisfied with the service. If the experience was better than expected, then perceived service quality is high and the customer is delighted. If the experience did not meet expectations then service quality is perceived to be poor and the customer is dissatisfied (see also Parasuraman et al 1985, Brogowicz et al 1990, Grönroos 1990, Berry and Parasuraman 1991, Haywood-Farmer and Nollet 1991). Published in the International Journal of Service Industry Management, vol 6, no 2, 1995, pp 46-61 Robert Johnston is Professor of Operations Management at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK, email [email protected]