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Introduction
The role of customer expectations in explaining consumer behavior and service provider success is well established in services management and marketing literature. As [8] Davidown and Uttal (1989) point out, "levels of {customer} expectations are why two organizations in the same business can offer far different levels of service and still keep customers happy" (p. 84). Researchers such as [64] Zeithaml et al. (1993) have studied what comprises customer expectations. Their findings suggest that a battery of dimensions helps to compose expectations - concepts such as, but not limited to: personal service philosophies, perceived alternatives, explicit service promises, previous experience with the service, word of mouth communication, and personal needs.
One model that investigates the role that expectations have in customer and ultimately firm outcomes is the zone of tolerance model. The zone of tolerance model suggests that there is a non-linear relationship between a customer's perception of service quality and key outcomes such as satisfaction and loyalty. [2] Berry and Parasuraman (1991) suggest that the "zone of tolerance is a range of service performance that a customer considers satisfactory" (p. 58). They hypothesize that performance below the zone will engender customer frustration and decrease customer loyalty, whereas performance above the zone will pleasantly surprise customers and strengthen their loyalty. [64] Zeithaml et al. (1993) paper define the zone of tolerance as "the extent to which customers recognize and are willing to accept heterogeneity {in service delivery}" (p. 6). They suggest that customers are willing to accept differences in service quality from one service encounter to the next without those differences making major impacts on their overall perceptions of provider quality or causing changes to their overall satisfaction levels.
[22] Johnston (1995) follows up on these early studies by trying to capture visually, through the use of a series of figures, the zone of tolerance. His model is based on the theory that customers have three different notions of pre-performance expectations - more than acceptable, acceptable, and unacceptable. The acceptable range is essentially what Johnston labels as the zone of tolerance. If the quality of the service execution generally falls within the customer's acceptable range of pre-performance expectations, they will be satisfied. If the service delivery is in their more than acceptable range, which...