Service industries are characterised by

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Measuring Service Quality Management Customer
Care

• Service industries are characterised by
• Intangibility
• Heterogeneity
• Inseparability of production from consumption
• Services cannot be stored in inventories
• A lack of symmetry in the power relationships
  i.e. who can judge the work of a professional
  save a fellow professional?

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Why Not Just Use Satisfaction to Measure Service
Quality?

• There General problems with satisfaction scores
• People bring differing expectations into a
  situation and have different starting points
• To measure quality just through a satisfaction
  score may have a limited value
• Is it the role of e.g. public services (such as a
  probation service) to provide satisfaction ?

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Quality Management Customer CareSERVQUAL
Questionnaire

• What Do We Know About Expectations?
• Frequency and length of use of the service the
  expectations gap will narrow over time
• Services affect consumers differently (house
  repair differs from an operation for cancer)
• Expectations are influenced by knowledge held by
  producers/consumers about what is feasible
• Attitudes (formed by previous bad experiences)
  may indicate lower expectations
• Feelings are important (e.g. at times of grief)

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Quality Management Customer CareSERVQUAL
Questionnaire

• Three common mismatches are
• Consumer expectations vs. management expectations
  of what the service should be
• Actual service delivery vs. information about the
  service
• Expected service vs. perceived service

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Quality Management Customer CareSERVQUAL
Questionnaire

• The Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry model..
• Originally identified 10 dimensions of quality
  and developed a list of 97 items on a seven point
  scale
• After testing and subsequent refinement (i.e.
  factor analysis) the list was collapsed into a
  22-item questionnaire covering 5 dimensions..)
  called SERVQUAL

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Quality Management Customer CareSERVQUAL
Questionnaire

• Tangibles (environmental factors)
• Reliability
• Responsiveness
• Assurance
• EmpathyThese factors would differ in importance
  from service to service e.g. reliability is more
  important in a bank, empathy in a hospital!

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Quality Management Customer CareSERVQUAL
Questionnaire

• Gap analysis
• The questionnaire is divided into 2 main
  sections
• Expectations measures what is anticipated in an
  ideal service (on a 7-point scale)
• Perceptions then measures those aspects of the
  service as actually delivered or experienced
• Satisfaction (S) is conceptualized as the gap
  between expectations and perceptions
• So.. SE-P

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Quality Management Customer CareSERVQUAL
Questionnaire
USA General Sample 1990 Dimension
Weight Perceptions Expectations
Gap ----------------------------------------------
---------- Tangibles 0.11 5.54
5.16 0.38 Reliability
0.32 5.16 6.44
-1.28 Responsiveness 0.22 5.20
6.36 -1.16 Assurance 0.19
5.50 6.50 -1.00 Empathy
0.16 5.16 6.28
-1.12 --------------------------------------------
------------ Weighted averages n1936 5.28
6.27 -0.99  (Source calculated
from from Zeithaml, Parasuraman and Berry 1990
)
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Quality Management Customer CareSERVQUAL
Questionnaire
UK Hospital Outpatient SurveyDimension
Weight Perceptions Expectations
Gap ----------------------------------------------
---------------------- Tangibles 0.13
5.21 5.24
-0.03 Reliability 0.26 5.52
6.31 -0.79 Responsiveness 0.21
5.88 6.17 -0.29 Assurance
0.20 5.98 6.39
-0.41 Empathy 0.20 5.66
6.16 -0.50 ----------------------------
---------------------------------------- Weighted
averages n 72 5.67 6.15
-0.48
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Quality Management Customer CareSERVQUAL
Questionnaire
Finland Hospital Outpatient Survey Dimension
Weight Perceptions Expectations
Gap ----------------------------------------------
--------------------- Tangibles 0.18
5.64 6.03 -0.38 Reliability
0.21 5.51 6.04
-0.54 Responsiveness 0.20 5.73
6.12 -0.39 Assurance 0.22
5.83 6.23 -0.40 Empathy
0.19 5.74 6.08
-0.35 --------------------------------------------
----------------------- Weighted averages n
135 5.72 6.14 -0.41
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Quality Management Customer CareSERVQUAL
Questionnaire

• Applicability in the public sector
• In education it is possible that a teacher get
  high scores for satisfaction (whereas in practice
  the course was not sufficiently demanding)
• In social services you could (in theory) put
  good tenants in one housing unit and
  undesirable tenants in another and this could
  increase the satisfaction scores (while being
  discriminatory!)

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Quality Management Customer CareSERVQUAL
Questionnaire
Measurement scales ---------------------------
-------------------- D
C
B A we
can say that the distance __ __
__ __ AD AB BC CD If
these scales are genuinely ordinal, we cannot
add, subtract, multiply, divide
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Quality Management Customer CareSERVQUAL
Questionnaire

• Reactions to SERVQUAL
• Used in a large number of studies and therefore
  some comparability over time/between studies
• Academic rather than Industry based
• Does need to be combined with other measures
  (such as value analysis, history, competition)
• Gap analysis may map imperfectly onto quality
• Some doubts remain on a technical level as to
  what is actually being measured

14
Quality Management Customer CareSERVQUAL
Questionnaire

• Calculating SERVQUAL scores
• This can be easily done
• Easily done using a spreadsheet
• Utilize the SERVCALC program which mechanises the
  process

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• The Texas AM study revealed that the service
  dimensions evaluated by SERVQUALa tool developed
  for use in the private sectorneed to be adjusted
  for use in the public sector. In the Texas AM
  administration of SERVQUAL, scores were highly
  reliable but a factor analysis failed to capture
  the five dimensions prescribed by the protocols
  designers (1) tangibles, i.e., appearance of
  physical facilities, equipment, personnel, and
  communication materials (2) reliability, i.e.,
  ability to perform the promised service
  dependably and accurately (3) responsiveness,
  i.e., willingness to help customers and provide
  prompt service (4) assurance, i.e., knowledge
  and courtesy of employees and their ability to
  convey trust and confidence and (5) empathy,
  i.e., the caring, individualized attention the
  firm provides its customers. Only three service
  dimensions were isolated at Texas AM (1)
  tangibles (2) reliability and (3) affect of
  library service, which comprises the more
  subjective aspects of service, such as
  responsiveness, assurance, and empathy. Specific
  issues of strategic interest for local library
  administrators were considered at the individual
  question level. Additionally, a specific
  analytical model, Six Sigma, was evaluated for
  its applicability for quantifying the gap between
  service expectations and perceptions.