| dc.description.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. | en_ZW |
