Product vs Service Quality

Customer satisfaction is impacted by service and product quality. In turn, the purchase intentions of a customer, customer loyalty and ultimately an organization’s revenue stream are affected by customer satisfaction. In that customer satisfaction has a direct relationship to a positive revenue stream, the success of a business is contingent on service and product quality. The manner in which product quality and service quality is assessed differs in the particular measures used to gauge each.

Quality is measured differently in manufacturing and service industries. There are three reasons for this:

• the tangibility of the product
• the time of production
• the level of customer contact

Service Quality

Service is gauged to be of high quality if the service provided is appropriate for the task at hand and if it is technically sound as measured by the degree to which the service provided produces a customer’s desired result. Unlike the sale of a product, the provision of a service requires the direct interaction of the customer and service provider. As a result, service quality is often assessed using qualitative measures.

Service Quality Measures – A customer’s perception of service quality tends to be positive if the manner in which a service is provided meets or exceeds customer expectations in very specific ways that tend to establish or reinforce an organization’s relationship with a customer. Eric Miller writes in “A Handbook for Measuring Customer Satisfaction and Service Quality” that customers expect a consistent, reliable and timely provision of service, a service provider who possesses the skills necessary to provide the service and an accessible service provider who is polite and respectful, and who communicates with the customer in a language the customer is able to comprehend. In addition, high service quality is achieved by a service provider who does the work necessary to understand the customers’ needs and engenders confidence, through attitude and expertise, that service objectives will be accomplished.

Product Quality

In that product quality implies an organization’s ability to produce low-cost products at a high volume, quantitative tools are frequently used to measure product quality. Unlike the tools frequently used to measure service quality, product quality assessment tools evaluate the degree to which a product adheres to its formal specifications. These specifications may include customer business requirements and performance, technical and regulatory requirements.

Product Quality Measures – Joel Wisner writes in “Principles of Supply Chain Management: A Balanced Approach” that the quality of a product is frequently evaluated on the basis of the number of defects per unit produced, the number of products returned or the number of warranty claims per units sold, the number of quality certified suppliers used to produce the product, the implementation of statistical process control in the production processes, the lead time from defect identification to correction, and the number of quality awards won by an organization.