Quality and prosumership. Proserv: a new tool for measuring the customer satisfaction

The current paper aims to present a new model for assessing the Customer Satisfaction. The model, named Prosumership Service Quality Model (PROSERV), can be seen as an extension of the European Customer Satisfaction Index (ECSI), where the centrality of the customer is developed in order to take into account the prosumership as a fundamental part of service quality and satisfaction. The theoretical model has been formalized in 4 hypotheses: (HP1) the PROSERV-Q questionnaire has a good level of reliability; (HP2) the PROSERV-Q underlies the three level abstraction modelled by PROSERV; the estimated level of overall satisfaction has high correlation with the external global satisfaction index (HP3) and Loyalty (HP4). In order to test these hypotheses, the PROSERV - and the associated questionnaire PROSERV-Q – are applied to a sample of 680 customers of services. The theoretical model has been conceptualized as a three levels hierarchical structure, and statistically formalized with the PLS Path Modelling (PLS-PM) with higher-order constructs. Results are consistent with hypotheses, in that providing evidence that the three-level PROSERV model is able to capture the fundamental constitutive components of customer satisfaction and, at same time, affects the loyalty.