Expectations, Perceived Performance, and Customer Satisfaction for a Complex Service: The Case of Bank Loans

The models currently used to describe customers\u27 satisfaction with products and services presume that customers have well-formed performance expectations. The present study uses data from the Swedish Customer Satisfaction Barometer to show that these models fail to describe customer satisfaction with bank loans, a complex, heterogeneous, and infrequently purchased service. Performance expectations are more likely an artifact of performance in this case and have no effect on satisfaction. This is quite different from other products and services where expectations are a stronger predictor of performance and have a positive effect on customer satisfaction