Innovative tertiary strategies on improving satisfaction level of students

A university is defined as a place where a group of people with different principles, thoughts and academic background is assembled together under a common institutional logo or name (Michael, 1997). Students are seen as critical customers and key stakeholders since they are the main customers of any university (Hill, 1995). The university or higher education institution is a service industry with the main goal to help students fulfill their expectations and needs (Vrontis et al., 2007; Elliott & Shin, 2002). Therefore, an organization should work on its relationship (Franco and Haase, 2017; Festa et al., 2017; Bresciani et al., 2012; Christofi et al., 2015) with its most valuable resources, students, (Helfert et al., 2002) and develop a long-term customer relationship (Grönroos, 1989). Nowadays, due to competitive environments in higher education, universities find themselves facing a problem that might threaten their existence. In the literature, business-orientated education institutes are found to be moving toward services-oriented marketing where the main ‘P’ is people. Moreover, student satisfaction is found to be the main reason for their persistence where it is defined as the students’ evaluation of their experiences with the services provided. Measuring the level of student satisfaction through service quality dimensions has been conducted by numerous researchers to understand how customers react to services or products offered.