Another look into the agenda of customer satisfaction: focusing on service providers’ own and perceived viewpoints

Customer satisfaction is increasingly considered to be a basic determinant of business success, one that has considerable effect on firm performance (customer retention, re‐purchase and profitability). Seeks to add to previous but limited attempts to assess the service providers’ understanding of the satisfaction of their customers. The indirect assessment of customer satisfaction draws on management’s ability to differentiate between the quality of the provided services as perceived by themselves and as they think it is perceived by their customers. Develops a service satisfaction construct by making use of previous research instruments that have been developed to assess customer satisfaction from the customers’ perspective. Contests and tests empirically a five‐dimensional construct which comprises interactive, corporate, physical, price and convenience dimensions. Uses empirical data from a sample of 270 retail bank managers in Greece in order to test the hypotheses.