What is Zone of Tolerance explain briefly?

Zeithaml gave the concept of the zone of tolerance, which can be defined as a zone between the desired and the adequate level of service. This is shown in the figure given below.

This tends to rationalize service quality in terms of the expected quality and the quality that is actually received by the consumer. The actual service delivery can be within the zone of tolerance or above/below it.

This can be explained as follows:

1. Customer Delight: It occurs when the service performance exceeds the expectations of the customer. It is very difficult to put into practice, and that is why consumers are often surprised and hence delighted when it occurs.

2. Customer Satisfaction: It happens when the service delivery is within the zone of tolerance as defined by the consumer.

Satisfaction levels can also depend on where the actual level is within the zone (high or low).

3. Customer Dissatisfaction: It happens when the actual performance falls below the level of adequate service as expected by the consumer.

Again the intensity of the consumer’s reaction can range from being dissatisfied to extremely angry depending on how vast the difference is.

Width of Tolerance Zone

The level of variability that is acceptable to the consumer is defined as the width of the tolerance zone. This variability can be in the form of product performance, promotion campaigns, the performance of sales teams, etc.

Height of Tolerance Zone

When the zone is narrow, then there is a very fine line between what the customers want and the expectations that they have. In other words, this means that the marketer will have a hard time because it is very challenging to satisfy such customers.

On the other hand, when the zone is wide, then it becomes easier for service firms to satisfy consumers. It is always difficult to delight customers.

On the other hand, the situation where consumers are dissatisfied is a situation that companies try to avoid at all costs.

Customers also tend to have different expectations and different zones of tolerance for various factors of the service.

For example, customers of a restaurant may have average expectations for ambience, low expectations for staff but very high expectations for the food quality.

Marketers have to keep two aspects in mind:

1. The marketer needs to consider those aspects which are considered important by the consumer. Consumers may have expectations on a variety of factors, but there are a few which are most critical for them.

Firms often look at product strategy, but there can be many other factors that severely impact the marketing program of the company.

2. The marketer also needs to have a mechanism for measuring consumer expectations and product performance over time.

Synchronization of product performance and expectations of the consumer with the zones of tolerance acts as a very important tool by which customer satisfaction for the product or service can be increased over time.

This tool also helps the company track its performance and customer satisfaction with new products/services. It also helps the company to take necessary remedial actions if customer satisfaction is found to be deteriorating.

Posted on August 4, 2022 by Robert Bacal Leave a comment

Zone of Tolerance A More Accurate Customer Satisfaction Model

The Zone of Tolerance Model Of Customer Satisfaction

The Zone of Tolerance Model of Customer Satisfaction is a refinement of the gap model described here and has been around since the 1990’s.

We can define the relationship between customer satisfaction and other variables this way:

The Tolerance GAP is the difference between desired service and the level of service considered adequate. The larger that gap, the more likely the customer will be dissatisfied.

The chief strength of this is that it explains something the expectation models do not — why customers return to companies where the service is bad.

How so? The model suggests that there is a wide zone of customer service quality that is…well, OK. Barely adequate. So long as the company stays within that zone, the customer will not have a highly emotional reaction, and so will remain a customer.

So, the implication of the model is that you have to be quite bad to actually lose a customer forever, but the flip side is that it’s also hard to WOW a customer too.

That seems to correspond well to how real people actually behave when they encounter poor service, particularly the fact that they often return, particularly if the establishment has other desired characteristics — lower price, more convenient, closer location, etc.

However….

It’s important to remember that customer behavior, wants, needs, expectations are very fluid — they depend on an immediate context, and this applies here. It would be a mistake to think that customers have some consistent rule — let’s say they’ll only wait 5 minutes, that they apply to every single interaction.

Even at the same establishment, the rules or norms a customer applies will change depending on his or her situation. So a mother late picking up her child from school is clearly going to apply a different “rule” about how long she will wait in line compared to someone out for leisurely shopping.

That’s something we need to understand when looking at any customer satisfaction model.

Originally posted 2018-09-11 17:19:45.

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