Factors Driving Customer Satisfaction at Shopping Mall Food Courts

In the service industry, when providers generate a high level of customer satisfaction, they can gain and maintain a major competitive advantage in the marketplace. This competitive advantage can, in turn, lead directly to high profitability and growth. In the present competitive consumer landscape, world, shopping malls must deliver high-quality service to customers given that as a service ecosystem the mall must optimize its own resources and the resources of others to improve both its own circumstances and those of others. Against this general background, in this study, we assess the quality attributes of a food court located in a shopping mall by identifying factors related to the shopping mall—ambience, food variety, convenience, the tenants in the food court, food quality, food price, and restaurant staff. A descriptive analysis and a multivariate analysis, including structural equation modeling, are performed using IBM SPSS and AMOS statistical software. The results of the factor analysis indicate that food quality, followed by convenience and food variety, is the most important factor driving customer satisfaction. The results highlight the importance of networks between different stakeholders in such an ecosystem and provide developers and service providers with information in regard to the attributes most implicated in predicting customer satisfaction in a food court. On this basis, customers are viewed not only as evaluators but also as partners in producing service.