Why does the way you evaluate a service depends on when you evaluate it

Customer satisfaction has been traditionally studied and measured regardless of the time elapsed since the purchase. Some studies have recently reopened the debate about the temporal pattern of satisfaction. This paper aims to explain why “how you evaluate a service depends on when you evaluate it” on the basis of the theoretical framework proposed by Construal-Level Theory (CLT). CLT argues that future events are represented on different degrees of concreteness/abstractness according to the temporal perspective. Although an empirical investigation is still lacking, the literature does not deny that CLT can be applied also with regard to past events. Hence, we suggest that the weights of the determinants of overall satisfaction change over time by virtue of the different representations of the event according to the adopted temporal perspective.