Securing customer satisfaction through component service specifications: Purchasing maintenance services for social rented housing

Many companies nowadays buy services that they pass on to their customers. A specific example is a housing association that buys maintenance services to be delivered to their tenants. These services are referred to as component services and have a large impact on end customers, and this should be taken into account when developing the specifications for the service.The main objectives of this article are to (1) find out what end customers perceive as important for their customer satisfaction for component services; and (2) investigate whether the buying company gives sufficient attention to these characteristics in their service specifications. We investigate these issues in the context of maintenance services bought by Dutch housing associations and conduct a survey among tenants to determine the relative importance of different characteristics of the maintenance they receive on their dwellings. Subsequently, we investigate service specification documents to verify whether they sufficiently reflect the characteristics that are important for tenants.The survey results show that determinants of maintenance service quality that add to perceived tenant control are more important in case of reactive maintenance than in case of planned maintenance. Based on our analyses, we conclude that the selected housing associations only to a limited degree take these aspects into account in the specifications of maintenance services. Although replication in other settings is required, the results of this study suggest that buying companies are not always aware of the specific characteristics of component services, and how this affects the purchasing process.