A Longitudinal Analysis of the Impact of Service Changes on

A longitudinal model of the effect of a service change on customer attitudes about service quality is developed and estimated with data from a field experiment with 3 survey waves. The field experiment was conducted as part of GTE Laboratories Inc.'s customer satisfaction program and was devised to test the effect of a network upgrade program on residential customers' ratings. The interview procedure yielded 119 respondents who completed the interview for all 3 waves. Service changes were found to have a strong influence on customer assessments of service quality. The changes affected customer perceptions of present performance and disconfirmation. As expected, attitudes are affected strongly by current performance ratings and, to a lesser extent, by disconfirmation. The effect of disconfirmation is larger, and the effect of previous attitudes is smaller, directly after the service change than in a subsequent time period.