A STUDY OF CONSUMER SATISFACTION TOWARDS RESTAURANTS’ SERVICE QUALITY IN SURABAYA

The restaurant industry in Surabaya has shown rapid growth recently. This requires the restaurant businesses to recognize their competitive advantages in order to win the competition. One of the competitive advantages is a good service quality that will create consumer’s satisfaction. This research is aimed to know the consumer’s satisfaction towards service quality of restaurants in Surabaya and to identify if there is significant satisfaction differences based on consumer’s demographic which are gender, age, occupation, level of education and level of income. The consumers of eleven upscale restaurants in Surabaya, Indonesia were surveyed to define their expectation and perception towards the service quality of the restaurants that they experienced based on the SERVQUAL model. SERVQUAL model has five dimensions such as tangible, responsiveness, reliability, assurance and empathy. The questionnaires used were five point Likert type scales which were distributed to 553 consumers who were dine-in by using convenience and quota sampling technique. The quota for each restaurant is 50 questionnaires. The method of analysis used were descriptive statistics, customer satisfaction index, independent sample t-test and one-way ANOVA. The result shows that empathy has the biggest customer satisfaction index, 0.9714, compared to the other dimensions. It means that consumers are satisfied that the restaurant’s staffs are helpful and give personal attention to the consumers. Assurance has the lowest customer satisfaction index, 0.9332. It can be said that the consumers are satisfied that the staffs have good product knowledge, able to handle complaint and courteous to the consumers. Overall, customer satisfaction index is 0.9610 that means consumers are satisfied to the service quality that the restaurants in Surabaya have. In addition, there is no significant satisfaction differences for the consumers with different age group, different level of education and different level of income there is only significant satisfaction differences for the consumers of different gender, that is men are more satisfied than women, and different occupation, that is civil servants are more satisfied than other occupations