Interpersonal service quality of the Chinese: determinants and behavioral drivers

The limited explanatory power of service quality models outside their nascent Western contexts is in no small part due to the significant role of cultures in constructing customers’ interpretations. While the Chinese are globally significant, we lack understanding of service quality for these customers. We report service quality determinants and explain customers’ interpretation as artifacts of Chinese culture. Our findings, based on a substantive multi-stage research design, report six service quality dimensions of professionalism, comfortableness, sense of sincerity, respect, active service and chin-chieh. We also report how behavioral drivers act to form evaluations of this Chinese service quality. Our proposed interpretation of Chinese service quality advances the discourse in this area in a way that provides both managers and researchers with a sound platform to understand customers’ evaluations outside those familiar to the Western world.