Understanding Service Customers

This article describes an exploratory study, based on 259 interviews, examining whether it is meaningful to segment customers by the relative importance they place on the interpersonal and noninterpersonal aspects of service quality, and if so, whether the segments differ in their perceptions of overall service quality. The study shows that customers can have different priorities in terms of interpersonal and noninterpersonal quality, and this can influence their perceptions of service quality. For practitioners, this could provide a useful means of segmenting customers; for researchers, it raises an important issue in the interpretation of service quality research.