Handle With Care: Examining the Relationship Between Empathy and Customer Satisfaction In Retail Clinics

Abstract

Since the turn of the 21st century, retail clinics (or colloquially, “quick clinics,”) have become an increasingly popular alternative to primary health care providers. However, there is limited quantitative research on factors that affect retail clinics and their operations. The well-known SERVQUAL model is a generally accepted framework in determining the elements of service quality that lead to customer satisfaction, and consists of a set of five different traits, one of them being empathy, or individualized attention (Parasuraman, et al., 1988). This thesis analyzes whether or not empathy has a significant impact on retail clinics’ perceived ability to provide quality care to its patients, as determined by a scenario-based role-playing experiment focusing on these areas. The findings from this research determined that while empathy impacts customer satisfaction from the patient perspective, it has a more complicated effect on the managerial perspective.