Delivering consistently good service quality is difficult but profitable for service organizations. Understanding why it is so difficult and how it might be facilitated is the purpose of the article. The authors' intent is to identify a reasonably exhaustive set of factors potentially affecting the magnitude and direction of four gaps on the marketer's side of their service quality model. Most factors involve (1) communication and control processes implemented in service organizations to manage employees and (2) consequences of these processes, such as role clarity and role conflict of contact personnel. Literature from the marketing and organizational behavior fields on these topics is reviewed and integrated with qualitative data from an exploratory study. Discussion centers on insights that can be obtained from empirical testing of the extended model.
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