ABSTRACT
The previous chapter suggests that the managerial rationality of customerism embedded in the service and market orientation program has informed the strategic intentions of the FI. But the chapter also suggests that managers were operating with a very general understanding of customerism. Even though they had the impression that the customers of the FI, on a general level, were satisfi ed with the services they received, they did not know exactly how those customers perceived the services, whether or not they were satisfi ed with how the FLEs offered the services to them, and whether or not they wanted to change anything in the service offering of the FI. In order to grasp these issues and, formulated in the analytical language drawn on here, to embed deeper into the organization and the employees the power/knowledge of SMM, the management of the FI decided to systematically measure customer-perceived service quality, known to be one of the major research fi elds of SMM (see, for instance, Berry and Parasuraman 1993; Brown et al. 1994; Schneider and White 2004). To help them, the managers had consultants and researchers acting as consultants specializing in service quality measurement and closely related fi elds, e.g. customer satisfaction measurement. The coupling with academia and academic knowledge was thus tight.
