Are We Delivering What Customers Want? Charting Logistics Service Quality Research—A Process View

ABSTRACT Logistics service quality reflects the gap between customers' expectations for logistics service and the actual service they receive, yet it is unclear whether academic research has kept pace with changes in logistics practice over the past 25 years. This article reviews 173 empirical studies on logistics service quality drawn from leading supply chain, logistics, and marketing journals. Using a process – oriented perspective, we develop a framework that categorizes prior work according to antecedents, mechanisms, and outcomes, and we map how different factors collectively shape logistics service quality in both business–to–business and business–to–consumer contexts. Our review shows that, while research has extensively examined firm capabilities, fulfillment performance, and customer attitudes, important gaps remain regarding logistics service quality in nontraditional settings (e.g., reverse and closed–loop supply chains, decentralized supply networks), consistency across channels and service settings, employee management and service failure prevention, interactions among logistics service quality dimensions, consumer participation and heterogeneity, and the social dimension of logistics service quality. We conclude by outlining a future research agenda to address these gaps.