From Compliance to Customer Experience: Managing Service Operations Quality in Chinese Swimming and Fitness Centers

Abstract

This paper examines customer experience in Chinese swimming and fitness centers through an operations lens. Although prior research in sport and fitness services has consistently shown that service quality affects satisfaction and future behavioral outcomes, less attention has been paid to the operational conditions that make quality stable, visible, and reproducible in high-contact, risk-sensitive service systems. Addressing this gap, the paper develops the concept of service operations quality to explain how compliance-oriented managerial inputs are translated into customer experience across the service journey. The analysis organizes service operations quality around three interdependent dimensions: hygiene and safety, staff professionalism, and facilities and environment. Rather than treating these dimensions as isolated service attributes, the paper argues that they function as a coordinated operational capability through which venues become governable, intelligible, and dependable in customers’ eyes. This capability is shown to become visible across acquisition, entry, use, change, and after-sales touchpoints, where operational consistency shapes whether the service is experienced as orderly, trustworthy, and worth repeating. The paper further argues that, in multi-store swimming and fitness networks, customer experience depends less on isolated moments of excellence than on the repeated consistency of operational control across outlets, staff teams, and time windows. On this basis, the study offers a managerial framework for standardization, service consistency, and resource prioritization under real-world constraints. By shifting the discussion from perceived service quality to service operations quality, the paper contributes a more practically grounded account of how compliance can be converted into stable customer experience in contemporary sport services.