Service Quality and Client Satisfaction: Cases of Multiple Providers of Agricultural Extension Service in Bangladesh

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

Today’s world competition is very strong in every kind of businesses. Every organisations must provide high quality products or services in order to survive, however their competitors also providing the same or comparable products or services. An important way to an organisation to get an edge over its competitors is to provide extra service to satisfy and delight their customers, which can retain them and also gain new customers. Therefore the achievement of customer satisfaction must be a major objective in all organisations.

Today's world competition is very strong in every kind of businesses. Every organisations must provide high quality products or services in order to survive, however their competitors also providing the same or comparable products or services. An important way to an organisation to get an edge over its competitors is to provide extra service to satisfy and delight their customers, which can retain them and also gain new customers. Therefore the achievement of customer satisfaction must be a major objective in all organisations.

The Gaps Model of Service Quality was originally developed for application in the financial service sector. The model was

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

* The difference between expectations of service for a given organization and perceived quality of delivery by the service provider

Executive Summary The research aims to investigate the relationship between how Nordstrom has adopted to improve its customer centricity by the SERVQUAL and the 3Ps analysis. SERVQUAL was developed by A. Parasuranman, Leonard Berry and Valerie A Zeithaml in the 1980s. According to Parasuraman, Berry, & Zeithaml, SERVQUAL is a multi-item scale developed to assess customer perceptions of service quality in service and retail businesses (Parasuranman, Berry, & Zeithaml, 1988). The five dimensions of SERVQUAL, which are tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy.

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

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)

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

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”.

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).

Service quality represents a fundamental aspect of delivery, which strongly influences consumer satisfaction and, as a result, loyalty. In today’s global market a customer’s service expectation has to be met and exceeded eventually in order to retain customers as well as achieve success. Perceived quality of a product or a service is becoming one of the major competitive factors in the business world and has led to the innovation of the ‘Quality Era’ (Peeler, 1996). In simple words, the comparison of customer expectations with service performance is service quality. On the other hand, customer satisfaction is defined as a pleasurable fulfilment response toward a good, service, benefit, or reward (Oliver, 1997). Both of these

This study used five point Likert scale to measure client satisfaction. As very few responses were recorded in very dissatisfied category so this category is merged with dissatisfied category. Slightly more than two third of the farmers are either satisfied (71.1%) or very satisfied (5%) with the content of extension service (Figure 1). Farmer satisfaction is highest with agent’s behavior where 16% farmers are very satisfied and 65.1% satisfied. On the contrary little less than half of the respondents were either dissatisfied (11.3%) or in no opinion (32.4 %) category with extension service method. Overall satisfaction percentage shows that a little more than half