Abstract
Measuring both customer and societal satisfaction is critical to the process of serving them and outdoing competition. This is also true for agribusiness and the food industry. Predicated on the view that quality is defined as meeting or exceeding customer expectations, the gap approach has contributed significantly to our understanding of the service delivery process in several areas. The gap model serves as a general framework to examine the total delivery system, measure gaps, and explore not only the causes of the gaps but approaches towards their closure. An interesting and important question concerns the extension and applicability of the gap model to the business-to society context. This extension has significant implications for the assessment of the delivery system as well as the measurement and diagnosis of potential gaps. A subjective approach of corporate social performance is chosen. It is argued that social responsiveness can be considered as a requirement of an economic offering, which is experienced and sensed by society without actually consuming it. The developed model provides a modular approach to assess the performance of the delivery system. The delivery system can be assessed at the consumer, channel-member and/or society level. Finally recommendations for further research are provided
