BS2914 Quality Management

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BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care

• 5 The SERVQUAL Questionnaire

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BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care 5 The
SERVQUAL Questionnaire

• 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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BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care 5 The
SERVQUAL 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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BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care 5 The
SERVQUAL Questionnaire

• Tangibles (environmental factors)
• Reliability
• Responsiveness
• Assurance
• Empathy
• These 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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BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care 5 The
SERVQUAL 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 conceptualised as the gap
  between expectations and perceptions
• So.. SP-E

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BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care 5 The
SERVQUAL Questionnaire

• How are expectations formed ?
• Frequency and length of use of the service- the
  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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BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care 5 The
SERVQUAL Questionnaire

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

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BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care 5 The
SERVQUAL 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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BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care 5 The
SERVQUAL Questionnaire
East Midlands, UK OutpatientsJuly
1995 Dimension 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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BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care 5 The
SERVQUAL Questionnaire
Vaasa,Finland Outpatients Jan-Feb
1996 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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BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care 5 The
SERVQUAL Questionnaire

• 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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BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care 5 The
SERVQUAL 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 estate and undesirable
  tenants in another and this could increase the
  satisfaction scores (whilst being
  discriminatory!)

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BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care 5 The
SERVQUAL 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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BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care 5 The
SERVQUAL Questionnaire

• Reactions to SERVQUAL
• Used in a large number of studies and therefore
  some comparability over time/between studies
• Not as producer-led as some surveys
• BUT does need to be combined with other measures
  (as authors admit)
• Gap analysis may map imperfectly onto quality
• Some doubts remain on a technical level as to
  what is actually being measured

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BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care 5 The
SERVQUAL Questionnaire

• Calculating SERVQUAL scores
• This can be done in 3 ways
• Manually, for small survey
• Using a spreadsheet for a larger scale model
• Utilise the SERVCALC program which mechanises the
  process (but needs the preparation of an ASCII
  data file first)
• Download program/papers fromhttp//better.statis
  tics.ws