Expected and perceived service quality at basketball stadiums in Greece

Abstract

The purpose of the current research was to examine the differences between expected quality of service and the perceived quality of service experienced by spectators at selected professional basketball stadiums in Northern Greece. Five hundred spectators filled in the evaluation instrument created for the purpose of the study. The Wilcoxon's matched-pairs signed—ranks test showed a statistically significant difference in all 23 items between expectations and perceptions of service quality and in all cases only organizational weaknesses were proved to exist and no strengths. The exploratory factor analysis revealed nine factors: “show time expectations”, “installation's evaluation”, “convenience and employee evaluation”, “show time evaluation”, “employee expectations”, “convenience expectations”, “installation's expectations”, “comfort evaluation” and “comfort expectations”. The challenge of providing a high quality sport and recreation service becomes less difficult when sport managers know what their customers expect from a service and what they feel is important to quality. From a managerial perspective, identifying the dimensions and knowing both a spectator's evaluations and expectations of a provided service indicates the direction that management should take in investing its efforts and resources to increase the probability of the customer experiencing a positive outcome from watching.

Keywords:

• service quality
• professional sport
• basketball stadium
• spectator
• perceptions
• expectations