Recent research has suggested that customer evaluation of service encounters depends not only on the attributes of the particular service rendered but also on other cognitive and affective factors. This article sets out to investigate the effects that preconceptions about service types have on customers’ perceptions and on their overall evaluation of service encounters. The study is founded on Categorization Theory and Perception Distortion Theories and poses and tests three hypotheses on a customer sample taken from the Spanish retail banking sector. The results show a strong effect of preconceptions about the service category on the perceptions of quality during the service encounter; however, their direct effect on the overall evaluation of the service is unsubstantiated in our study.
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