Service Quality

Service Quality Assessment

The emergence of service quality and its assessment has attracted the attention of numerous researchers in the past two decades or so. In this sense, there are two main lines of thoughts on measuring service quality (Kang and James, 2004): an American and an European perspective. Brady and Cronin (2001) suggest that the researchers generally adopt one of the two conceptualizations in their work. The focus on functional quality attributes is referred to as the American perspective of service quality while the European perspective suggests that service quality considers two more components.

The European perspective considers additional aspects other than the process of service delivery. Grönroos (1984), for instance, noted that the quality of a service as perceived by customers consists of three dimensions: functional (the process of service delivery to customers), technical (the outcomes generated by the service to the customers), and image (how the customers view the company). Considering those dimensions, the quality of the service is dependent upon two variables: the expected service and the perceived service. More details of the previous argument are provided by Grönroos (1984).

Functional quality of a service is often assessed by measures of customers’ attitudes, as in customer satisfaction questionnaires. As described by Hayes (1997), the process of identifying customer’s attitudes begins with determining customer’s requirements or quality dimensions. Parasuraman et al. (1985) identified in a first study 10 quality dimensions based on a series of focus group sessions. From this study, the authors concluded that customers use the same criteria to assess service quality independently of the type of service.

For Hayes (1997), however, some quality dimensions are generalized across many services, but some will apply only to specific types of services, and it is necessary to understand quality dimensions to be able to develop measures to assess them. The author explains then two ways of identifying important quality dimensions of services: quality dimension development approach and critical incident approach. The first one uses different sources of information, such as opinions of providers and literature. The other one is a process to obtain information from customers.

The 10 determinants of service quality established by Parasuraman et al. (1985) provide a list that can guide investigation on the first approach. The authors subsequently developed SERVQUAL (Parasuraman et al., 1988), a two-part instrument for measuring service quality that was refined later (Parasuraman et al., 1991). Much of the research to date has focused on measuring service quality using this approach and its use has become quite widespread (Brown et al., 1993; Kang and James, 2004).

Measuring the Service Quality

Measuring could be done Qualitatively or Quantitatively. Any thing can be measured by evaluating the related factors & respective attributes. Considering various related attributes we can monitor the Service quality. Attributes needs to be measured to get the quality. Quality measurement is concerned with the observed value for some service attributes & then by comparing these values against standards, it is possible to get the quality status of respective product or process.

A number of large companies have introduced the quality metrics for improving the quality management processes. In general by collecting metrics on several attributes and defects, the entire Quality Management Process can be improved because metrics may help to identify the strong & weak attributes. By improving the weak area(s) companies can improve the quality.

A metric is a type of measurement, which relates to a system, process or related documentation. The use of systematic service measurement and careful monitoring of metric definitely can improve the overall service quality.

In terms of cellular mobile services, various service providers who provide cellular services are assessed with respect to the process metrics parameters. Service providers give cellular services like customer care, data transmission, multimedia service, billing service etc. to their customer. They measure the quality of service given by them to customer in terms of service parameters. Various general service parameters are like – reliability, usability, efficiency, portability. Quality Metrics is designed against such parameters. Specific to cellular mobile services the Quality Metrics includes following factors & attributes, which affects the service quality. Service quality measurement requires the measuring of respective service quality attributes and factors.

For internal conformance, the measures of quality have much in common with the well-known measures widely used in control of manufacturing processes. Measure of external conformance is more complex due to the abstract nature of some of the qualities and due to the subjective reactions of consumers.

An obvious source of data on external conformance is the cross-section of consumer complaints and claims, although many annoyed consumers will not take the trouble to complain. However, the complaints received do represent a sample of the types of annoyance to which all consumers are subject.

A second method of measure of external performance is through solicitation of consumer comments. A typical form of this is the appraisal card made available to consumers in hotel rooms and restaurants. Some companies use the summaries of these cards as the basis for a regular management report.

Additionally, some companies design special surveys of customer reaction, through letter questionnaires, telephone contacts and personal interview. The techniques used follow conventional market research practice.

Measures of service quality have to date been on an industry by industry basis, and this will continue for the foreseeable future.

Some service companies supplement their regular measures of quality by use of periodic audits. These audits are all-pervasive, covering both internal and external aspects of quality. As is common in formal audit plans, the service industry audit covers many incidents, observations, documents, etc. To reduce these findings to a simple score suitable for management reports (or for motivation plans) requires systems of summary, weighting, demerit values, ratings, etc…

Audit or review of the work of professional categories of personnel (e.g., researchers, physicians) runs into a special obstacle. These professional categories tend to feel that the review must be by a ‘peer group’, e.g., only physicians should review the work of physicians. When audit of such professional work is done by administrative personnel, the findings are not accepted wholeheartedly.