Service quality and loyalty behavior in professional business services: an operations based perspective to effective service management

This research proposes for the first time an operation-based client perspective of service quality to enable effective service management in professional business services, in particular within occupational safety, health and environment service firms. In so doing, this study responds to increasing calls from academics (e.g., professional service operations management scholars) and practitioners to move beyond the traditional service quality models when deciding how to manage professional business services. Building on the resource based view, the signalling theory, and the bounded rationality theory, we suggest a number of refinements to existing conceptualizations of service quality and empirically examines the effects of service quality dimensions on loyalty behaviour (purchase and recommending intentions). The results show that information quality (how recommendations are formulated and structured, and the technological system through which the information is delivered to the business client) rather than the people factor (the competence and operating agility of professionals) is the key success factor in service operations management, thereby supporting a resource-strategy contingency fit. The results contribute to knowledge on service quality in professional business services and the implications of opaque service quality in professional business services.