Measure Service Quality

Service quality

Service quality is a major factor contributing to customer satisfaction, however, excellent service quality is a prerequisite to satisfy customers completely and create customer loyalty (Kasper et al., 1999:139). Service quality is defined as the delivery of excellent or superior service relative to customers’ expectations (Zeithaml and Bitner, 1998:116). The basic principles that underlie the concept of service quality indicate certain factors.

• It is more difficult for customers to evaluate the quality of services than the quality of goods.

• Service quality is based on customers’ perception of the outcome of the service and their evaluation of the process by which the service was performed.

• Service quality perceptions result from a comparison of what the customer expected before the service and the perceived level of service received (Kurtz and Clow, 1998:98).

Consequently, it can be said that service quality is used by customers to evaluate service organizations, service processes and to differentiate between competing services. Customers’ expectations play an essential role in the judgement of service quality; therefore, a service that fails to meet the expectations of one customer might satisfy another customer whose expectation level of the service was not as high. As a result, it is important that service providers develop meaningful ways by which customers can judge the quality of the service offerings.

“A sound measure of service quality is necessary for identifying the aspects of service needing performance improvement, assessing how much improvement is needed on each aspect, and evaluating the impact of improvement efforts. Due to the intangible nature of a service SERVQUAL model was developed to measure customers’ evaluations of service quality.

SERVQUAL or RATER is a service quality framework. SERVQUAL was developed in the mid-eighties by Zeithaml, Parasuraman & Berry.

Concept

SERVQUAL was originally measured on 10 aspects of service quality: reliability, responsiveness, competence, access, courtesy, communication, credibility, security, understanding the customer and tangibles. It measures the gap between customer expectations and experience.

By the early nineties the authors had refined the model to the useful acronym RATER

The service quality dimensions used in the SERVQUAL model are:

Tangibles: This refers to appearance of physical facilities, equipment, personnel and written materials.

Reliability: ability to perform the promised service dependably and accurately;

Responsiveness: willingness to help customers and provide prompt service;

Assurance: knowledge and courtesy of employees and their ability to convey trust and confidence

Empathy: the caring, individualized attention the firm provides its customers.

The five gaps that organizations should measure, manage and minimize:

•Gap 1 is the distance between what customers expect and what managers think they expect - Clearly survey research is a key way to narrow this gap.

•Gap 2 is between management perception and the actual specification of the customer experience - Managers need to make sure the organization is defining the level of service they believe is needed.

•Gap 3 is from the experience specification to the delivery of the experience - Managers need to audit the customer experience that their organization currently delivers in order to make sure it lives up to the spec.

•Gap 4 is the gap between the delivery of the customer experience and what is communicated to customers - All too often organizations exaggerate what will be provided to customers, or discuss the best case rather than the likely case, raising customer expectations and harming customer perceptions.

•Gap 5 is the gap between a customer's perception of the experience and the customer's expectation of the service - Customers' expectations have been shaped by word of mouth, their personal needs and their own past experiences. Routine transactional surveys after delivering the customer experience are important for an organization to measure customer perceptions of service.

Quality measurement

Quality measurement is separated in subjective and objective processes, at which mostly the customer’s satisfaction is being measured. Measuring the customer’s satisfaction is an indirect way to measure quality.

Objective processes are being subdivided into primary and secondary processes:

During primary processes, test buying from silent shoppers are being made or normal customers are being watched.

During secondary processes quantifiable enterprise numbers like amount of complaints or the amount of given back goods are being analyzed, and with this information conclusions to quality can be drawn.

Subjective processes are being subdivided into characteristic orientated, incident orientated and problem orientated processes.

To the characteristic focused processes counts the SERVQUAL method To the incident focused processes counts the Critical Incident Theory To the problem focused processes counts the Frequenz Relevanz Analyse

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The most important and most used process to measure service quality is the SERVQUAL method.