Measuring customer service quality of English public sport facilities

Based on the database of Sport England's National Benchmarking Service, this paper analyses the customer service quality of 72 English public sport facilities by adopting three service quality measurement models and multivariate statistical analysis. The results suggest that cleanliness is the major weakness of the industry. It also has a significant impact on shaping customers' perception of value for money and classifying different levels of overall service quality. By contrast, accessibility is the main strength due to its high satisfaction level and low service quality gap. It is also the main driver of overall value for money. Significant differences in service quality are found due to facility type and size, where dry and small facilities outperform other kinds of facilities. Finally, alternative models provide inconsistent results for the dimension of catering, which implies that using different models can yield a more comprehensive measurement of performance.