The Relationship between Service Quality, Physical Evidence and Customer Satisfaction in Sports Centres

Purpose: Ensuring customer satisfaction is one of the basic requirements of quality management systems and excellence models, is obtained by comparing before the customer buys the expected performance with the actual perceived performance. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between quantitative and physical evidence and service quality with customer satisfaction of sports facilities in District ۵ of Tehran.Methodology: The research method is correlational in terms of implementation method. The statistical population includes all those who have used the services of sports facilities in District ۵. ۳۹۵ subjects were selected using cluster sampling as research samples. To collecting data, three questionnaires include quantitative and physical evidence (researcher-made), SERVQUAL (Parasuraman and Zithamel, ۱۹۸۸) and customer satisfaction (Kooshesh, ۲۰۱۴), was used. The validity of which was determined by ۱۲ experts in the field of sports management was confirmed. Also, in a pilot study on ۴۰ subjects using Cronbach's alpha, the reliability of the questionnaires was ۰.۸۶, ۰.۸۹ and ۰.۹۱, respectively.Findings: After the data collection, descriptive statistics, Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests, Pearson correlation, and multistage regression in SPSS software were used. The results showed a significant relationship between physical and quantitative characteristics and service quality with customer satisfaction. Also, there is an important relationship between customer satisfaction and the components of perceived factors, reliability, responsiveness, reliability and empathy. In addition, the variables of physical and quantitative characteristics and quality of services are significant predictors of the variable of customer satisfaction. Finally, suppose the quantitative and physical evidence and the quality of services of health clubs are at a suitable level. In that case, it can lead to customer satisfaction and more customer membership in that sports space.Originality: We showed the correlations between physical evidence, satisfaction, and loyalty in sports centres which were less noticed in previous studies. 

Keywords:

Customer satisfaction , Health clubs , Physical evidence , Service Quality