Importance Of Physical Environment On Customer Service

In this decade, the physical environment became one of the factors that contribute to the level of customer’s satisfaction in foodservice industry. This is because, the physical environment is part of the customer’s first impression when enter to any foodservice outlet in Malaysia. The first impression might affect the overall perceptions or views of the customers towards the overall service quality whether the overall service is good or bad. This physical environment can be illustrated as atmosphere, atmospheric, servicescape, service environment and physical evidence. It is vital for every foodservice outlet in Malaysia to create the very best physical environment of theirs to contribute more on customer’s satisfaction which can bring to customer’s loyalty.

The importance of physical environment has come into researchers and practitioners attention to ensure that the customers get high quality of service and good memorable experiences that can be shared to other people all over the world. Over the last few decades, there are rapidly growing empirical studies and evolving published literatures on the physical environment and its influence on customer satisfaction and employees productivity. There are several dimensions proposed by different researchers that applied in the hospitality disciplines which include ambience and layouts, facilities design and other elements which are used as indicator when measuring customer satisfaction and staff productivity. Although this physical environment is important to the foodservice industry, there is limited or unpublished study on collecting and summarizing of the empirical findings.

LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

In recent years, there has been an increasing amount of lit...

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...and food. In 2010, Barber and Scarcelli found that the element of cleanliness was adequately measure in customers’ perception of cleanliness and service quality.

3.1 METHODOLOGY

This study was based on the information gathered from previous research. Different authors have measured the effect of physical environment towards customer’s satisfaction in a variety of ways. One of the scale measurements that frequently applied by most of the previous researchers is the scale measurement developed by Churchill’s (1979) which is being used to measure SERVQUAL (Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry 1988). However, in this study, the methodologies used were observational survey at the foodservice outlet to observe their environmental factors such as layout, seating arrangement, employee’s appearance and ambience. Since this method is well known, we decided not to describe them.