An assessment of the impact of physical environment on customer satisfaction in Zimbabwe’s healthcare sector: The case of Manyame Medical Ccntre

Abstract

A comfortable physical environment contributes substantially to a business’ long- term survival, high profitability, reduced cost and competitiveness. This research study was undertaken with the objective of assessing the impact of physical environment on customer satisfaction in the context of Manyame Medical Centre, a private hospital in the dormitory town of Chitungwiza near Harare, the capital city of Zimbabwe. The research focused on the relationship between three major antecedents of the physical environment namely ambient conditions; space and functions; signs, symbols and artefacts (independent variables) and customer satisfaction (dependent variable). The descriptive research design was chosen in order to collect quantitative data using a self-administered questionnaire. The systematic sampling technique was used to draw a sample of 333 Manyame Medical Centre customers in and around Chitungwiza. In order to test the reliability of the instrument Cronbach Alpha was used. The overall Cronbach’s alpha value for all the constructs was 0.852, which is above the acceptable threshold level of reliability of 0.70, which indicated that the tool was reliable and the findings or results of the study can be reproduced, replicated or repeated under a similar methodology. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (version 25.0) was used to compute the correlation matrices to reveal the relationship between the variables. Hypotheses were tested using Pearson’s correlation coefficients to reveal relationships between variables. The results specifically revealed that physical environment dimensions are positively correlated to customer satisfaction with the most influential being the correlation between symbols and artefacts (r=0.913) followed by ambient conditions r=0.580), space and functions (r=0.622). Therefore the least significant variable of the physical environment is signage (r=0.217). The implications of the study are that health service organisations should improve their physical environment to enhance long term customer satisfaction, which leads to high profitability and increases market share. Future research on the topic should look at the entire health service sector which includes private, government, mission and non-governmental organisations.