Service Quality : Services Quality 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

When the competition was growing in service sector the demand for service quality was understood. At this time a new question was emerged, if it is possible to apply the principles of TQM in service industry. The literatures and viewpoints of different researchers made the latest moderations to TQM concepts and made TQM adaptable for service sector also.(2) Today, customers have a wide choice of service providers and they would choose only the best service providers in terms of quality, reliability, and profitability and who are at par with international standards. Therefore, the quality of service plays a dominant role and is a primary factor in ensuring the survival of the service provider in the global market. The whole focus is now concentrated on providing services to customer beyond his expectations. This concept is applicable to all service industries and has given birth to the concept of TQM in service

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

“Quality must provide goods and( services that completely satisfy the needs of both internal and external customers. Quality serves as the "bridge" between the producer of goods or services and its customer.”

Source : Adapted from A. Parasuraman, Valerie Zeithaml, and Leonard Berry, “A Conceptual Model of Service Quality and Its Implications for Future Research,” Journal of Marketing, 49 (Fall 1985)

Good customer service is the foundation of a cohesive, well run business; good customer service is tailored around the needs and wants of the consumer. Providing a level of service like this means paying attention to the customers needs and wants and delivering the product and service in a manner that makes ordering procedure as simple as it can be, doing this acts as a catalyst for profit in that it entices customers to return meaning they will know your product and save money in marketing and advertising (Hurlbert W., 2007) and spread the brand awareness and attract new customers through friends.

Customer satisfaction and service quality are the two important components that direct anyone’s attention in every concept related to marketing, services, etc. (Spreng and Mackoy, 2006). In today’s competitive era, the success lies in

First, it is essential to decompose the concept “Total Quality Management” to clearly understand its goal: “Total” goes for the fact that quality involves everyone and all activities in the company, “Quality” means conformance to Requirements “ Meeting Customer Requirements” and “Management” because Quality can and must be managed. 2 The TQM model is based on the hypothesis that a company’s survival is only possible if a competitive level is achieved and maintained for each of the so called «6 dimensions of quality»: • • • • • • Product & service quality On-time delivery Fair price Employees satisfaction Product & process safety Environment conservation.

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).

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.

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).