Customer satisfaction and quality of service: analysis of coherence and latent variables for the University ’s canteen service

In this paper we shall focus our attention to the concepts of Customer Satisfaction (CS) and Quality of Service (QS) in order to verify the validity of the measures involved in our case study. Undoubtedly, in the literature a long debate has been developed to define and to distinguish between these two measures. Starting from the SERVPERF and SERQUAL models (Cronin and Taylor, 1994), confirmatory analysis and structural equations models (Bartholomew, 1987) are applied in order to analyze the satisfaction of young students daily using the University’s canteens of Florence. In order to identify the latent variables and the measurement groups, we resort to a preliminary confirmatory factorial analysis that gives us also some information on the covariance between the latent variables themselves. The models of structural equations are identified; the systems of structural equations are defined using the standard notation stated by the Lisrel methodology (Bollen, 1989; Jöreskog and Wold, 1982; Kaplan, 2000) According to the evaluation expressed by the students interviewed on some crucial aspects of the perceived quality, we ratify the causal connections between the latent variables of the model and, at the same time, we provide for a dimension of quality perceived by the customers.