One substantial barrier to sustainable production is the customers’ perception that sustainability requires them to trade off quality standards, privacy, and customization of
services to reduce resource use (e.g., Foster, Sampson, and Dunn 2000; McKercher and Prideaux 2011). Even customers who have sustainable values and lifestyles are usually loath to make such a trade-off. One goal of research would be to investigate which customers include sustainable and
environmental criteria in their service quality evaluations, which criteria are important, and why. If customers’ perceptions of quality include sustainable criteria, they will be
less likely to perceive a trade-off between quality and sustainability.
Such studies should examine the importance of sustainability issues in determining and formulating the customers’ perceptions and evaluations of service quality, the contextual factors for that determination, and the ways to conceptualize and measure a “sustainability service quality index.” Such an index would be important because typical scales and conceptualizations of service quality take a narrow view of the customers’ (functional) needs and do not explicitly consider the customers’ interests and concerns pertaining to personal and society’s well-being