SERVQUAL consists of a model developed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry (1986) which helps measure service quality through a series of steps. It concentrates on the notion of perceived quality. "Perceived quality refers to a consumer's judgment about a product's overall excellence" (Zeithaml). "Perceived quality is more subjective than other definitions of quality" (Zeithaml). Through research conducted with focus groups, the researchers asked about the characteristics a service provider should have in order to have high quality. They found out that consistently all of the members of the focus group had similar criteria. With these findings, they created 10 quality dimensions. Later on, researchers found that these 10 dimensions overlapped and that customers could only distinguish 5 dimensions. (4. Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry 1986). This perception of service quality builds up from attitudes developed by customers over time towards a product or service. The other element present is consumer satisfaction that has been achieved by the actual use of a product or service.
[...] Conclusion SERVQUAL is a useful tool to establish customers' expectations and perceptions grouping them into quality dimensions. Although SERVQUAL has a fixed building structure, its development concept could be use to create scales adapted to particular service needs. This helps organizations focus on efforts to develop services that are fitted to customers' requirements. However this is not the available only tool to assess the quality of a service. It has proved that some other dimensions (such as recovery) or some other aspects (such as the tangibles) should also be taken into consideration. [...]
[...] Other tools and theories about Service Quality Gronroos' Dimensions In 1990, Gronroos determined 6 criteria to measure service quality. He mainly focused on the functional rather than the technical issues (6. Gronroos, 1990). The dimensions proposed by Gronroos are close to the one developed in the SERVQUAL model: - Professionalism and Skills - Attitudes and Behaviors - Accessibility and Flexibility - Reliability and Trustworthiness - Recovery - Reputation and Credibility Let's have a closer look on the dimensions that slightly or fairly differs from the SERVQUAL model. [...]
[...] Conceptual model of Service Quality Source: www.nku.edu/~geigerr/Servqual/servqual.ppt This model is useful to perform a Gap analysis between each of the individual elements. The ideal purpose of every organization is to meet the expected service fully so that there is no gap between management perceptions and expected service. Brief explanation of Gaps: - Gap 1 Knowledge Gap: The company works on creating processes and services that appeal to the customers expected service. Companies have to be careful in not accomplishing an expected service because this will affect their sales negatively. [...]
[...] Content and Form Some researchers (Gumesson, 1992; Schneider and Bowen, 1995) tried to go further by proposing an adaptation of the SERVQUAL typology to each service industry. The SERVQUAL dimensions give a mean to measure the quality of the content of the service, which might not differ from a service to another. However, it doesn't make any difference in the form taken by this service. As an example, tangibles could refer to the facilities for a sport center and to an aircraft for an airline company. [...]
[...] SERVQUAL SERVQUAL consists of a model developed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry (1986) which helps measure service quality through a series of steps. It concentrates on the notion of perceived quality. “Perceived quality refers to a consumer's judgment about a product's overall excellence” (Zeithaml). Perceived quality is more subjective than other definitions of quality” (Zeithaml) . Through research conducted with focus groups, the researchers asked about the characteristics a service provider should have in order to have high quality. They found out that consistently all of the members of the focus group had similar criteria. [...]
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