Service Quality And Quality Management Essay

Service quality is referred to a valuation of how good a delivered service meets the customer’s expectation. Upper management

For different types of companies, quality might refer to quality of products or quality of service. Compares with quality of products, service quality is much more difficult to measure because service is intangible and acts and processes only existing in time. In addition, service has unique characteristic which cannot be found in products, such as customer influence, inseparability of production and consumption, heterogeneity, perishability and labor intensity (Nie & Kellogg, 1999). Even though, there are still many practitioners and academics are keen on measuring service quality because it has already emerged as a key strategic issue. Companies want to better understand service quality, and to establish methods for improving quality to achieve competitive advantage and build customer loyalty (Abdullah, 2006). Based on the importance of service quality, an increasing number of literatures and companies pay attention to measuring

Service quality - refers to difference between the level of service that is expected from consumers and the perception of the service that is actually received. (Caruana,

Wang (2010) defined service quality as global judgement or an attitude towards the superiority of a service. Bitner and Hubbert (1994) also define service quality as “the customer’s overall impression of the relative inferiority and superiority of the organization and its services”. Moreover, Zeithaml and Bitner (2003) define “service quality is a focused evaluation that reflects the customer’s perception of specific dimensions of

Carman, J. M. (1990). Consumer perceptions of service quality: An assessment of the SERVQUAL dimensions. Journal of Retailing, 66 (1), 33-55.

The dimensions of service quality are listed in the text as reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy, and tangible.

Hung, Y. H., Huang, M. L., & Chen, K. S. (2003). Service quality evaluation by service quality performance matrix. Total Quality Management and Business Excellence.

The key to ensuring good quality service is meeting or exceeding what the customers expect from services. Judgements of high and low quality depend on how customers the actual service performance in the context of what they expected. Service quality, as perceived by the customers, can be defined as the extent of discrepancy but customers’ expectations or desires and their

The total quality management (TQM) incorporates quality into all the activities of the organization through an ongoing process. This control makes sure that there is a continuous improvement in all the activities and there will not be any chances for defects. TQM ensures safety and helps improve customer satisfaction (Daft, 2014).

Total Quality Management mans all the people in the organisation all committed to the product quality and services by doing

Service Quality as described by (William G. Zikmund, 1993) “is the degree to which the performance of service provider’s matches customer expectations. It can also be defined as those essential characteristics of a service that measures its excellence”.

These criticisms relates to conceptual, methodological and analytical issues in SERVQUAL. The primary issue raised in the literature is the conceptualization of service quality as the difference between perception and expectation [159]. Cronin and Taylor, reiterate their views against the disconfirmation based SERVQUAL scale of measuring service quality and continued to be proponents of their perception-only approach to service quality measurement. Further, the use of the perception and expectation gap measure of service also raises related analytical concerns about its low reliability, poor discriminant validity and spurious correlations [168-170]. Parasuraman et al.

SERVQUAL is a model used to measure service quality management in relation to customer service quality needs. It analyzes the gap between the two. In measuring service quality, SERVQUAL has been proved to be the most popularly used instrument in the past one decade. Oftenly, it is used to measure service quality of a service providing organizations to compare the expectations of customers beforehand and their perception in regard to the services being offered (Shahin, 2010). The model can be employed to assess the quality of services provided by any service organization, it being universal. Services are economic activities, they provide benefits, and create value for clients. As such, there is a need for measurement of their quality at specific points due to the desire for change, or on behalf of the customers that receive the services (Shahin, 2010).

Sureshchandra, Rajendran and Anantharaman (2002) identified five critical aspects of service quality from the customers point of view namely core service/service product, human element of service delivery, systematisation of service delivery, tangibles of service and lastly social responsibility in order to conceptualise service quality. Table 1 will further provide an explanation to the five critical aspects of service quality as outlined by Sureshchandra et al (2002).

Total quality management deals completely with the quality word. It focuses on the quality of products, quality of services, quality of management of staff, quality of services deliver to patrons and so on. So the question is arising “what is quality?”