In the beginning of massive production, originally developed during the industrial revolution, people wanted quantity instead of quality. Everything was new to them and their only intention was to have everything available in the market. Only in the 1980s the quality of products and services started to count. This situation changed year after year until nowadays, where people are looking for high quality and personalized products. Furthermore, service it is no more considered a separated industry, but it is colligated to the product and part of the delivery process. For the customer it is no more a luxury, but a necessity. People use services constantly in their everyday life, but in the majority of the cases they do not notice them until something goes wrong. In this paper, service is referred to service in terms of marketing. .
According to the business dictionary, "Service is any activity or benefit that one party can offer to another that is essentially intangible and may not result in the ownership of anything while service marketing is the promotion of economic activity offered by a business to its clients." Services have four main characteristics; intangibility, inseparability, variability and fluctuating demand, each of them effecting the process of delivery in its own way. It is exactly the intangibility characteristic that makes quality in service difficult to evaluate compared to quality measured in tangible goods. This comes due to the hesitation of people in evaluating things that they cannot see or touch and make the appreciation of quality very subjective.
Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction.
Nowadays, in a time where there are a big number of firms operating in the same industry, competition is increasingly rising. These firms have realized the need for differentiation in order to maintain their market share. One element that can be a competitive benefit for a firm or a company is quality.