ABSTRACT
The main objective of this dissertation is to evaluate how the experience of clients of
an elevated level of co-production services is associated to their satisfaction, their
trust and their loyalty in relation to the organization. To reach this purpose, a scale to
measure the clients’ experience was developed, and the evaluation that the
consumers made in relation to the studied dimensions was analyzed and, finally, the
association of the dimension in nomological net was verified. As a way to initiate the
study, a literary review about the relevant factors to the experience of services’
consumers was necessary and, more specifically, the ones of an elevated level of co-
production. Thus, it was developed a theoric review about a specific sort of service
from the research, the services’ consumers, and the services’ dimensions, being
defined for this study as interaction, attendance, quality, environment, structure and
atmosphere, and yet, about the defined relational aspects (satisfaction, trust and
loyalty). A structural model made up of eight hypotheses was elaborated in order to
analyze the relation between the evaluation of the experience and the relational
dimensions. During the empirical phase of the research, it was built a measurement
scale of the evaluation of the experience of a high level of co-production services’
clients, adopting a set of suggested stages in the specialized literature. For the
development of the scale and the test of the model, three field entries were made,
being the first and second ones with consumers of educational services in private
universities, and the third ones with consumers of beauty salons. The survey was
used as the research strategy and the quantitative approach was used in the results
analysis, particularly, in the techniques statistics of structural equation modeling.
Besides that, there were carried out two focus groups to give support to the
development of the scale used in this study. A number of 158 college students of
three different private universities in Fortaleza were interviewed in the first collect. In
the second one, 270 questionnaires were applied, once again in seven universities,
being four in the city of Fortaleza, one in Quixadá, one in Juazeiro do Norte, and one
in Macapá/AP. Finally, 255 questionnaires were applied in beauty salons, in fourteen
places of seven different neighborhoods from Fortaleza. In a general way, the three
specific purposes of the study were well served, with the validation of the
measurement scale, the analysis of the evaluation of the dimensions of the scale in
the perception of the clients and the discussion of the hypothesis. It was observed
that: (1) dimensions of quality and structure were the dimensions of the evaluation of
the experience in an elevated level of co-production services that positively most
influenced the satisfaction, (2) satisfaction influences loyalty in a more consistent way
trough trust; (3) the interaction influenced all the relational dimensions individually in
a different way, depending on the context (universities or beauty salons). At the end,
the theorical and practical implications were discussed, besides the indications of
improvement in future researches.
Keywords: Services, co-production, interaction, satisfaction, trust, loyalty.