Title: BS2914 Quality Management
1BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care
- 5 The SERVQUAL Questionnaire
2BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care 5 The
SERVQUAL Questionnaire
- Service industries are characterised by
- Intangibility
- Heterogeneity
- Inseparability of production from consumption
- Services cannot be stored in inventories
- A lack of symmetry in the power relationships
i.e. who can judge the work of a professional
save a fellow professional ?
3BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care 5 The
SERVQUAL Questionnaire
- The Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry model..
- Originally identified 10 dimensions of quality
and developed a list of 97 items on a seven point
scale - After testing and subsequent refinement (i.e.
factor analysis) the list was collapsed into a
22-item questionnaire covering 5 dimensions..)
called SERVQUAL
4BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care 5 The
SERVQUAL Questionnaire
- Tangibles (environmental factors)
- Reliability
- Responsiveness
- Assurance
- Empathy
- These factors would differ in importance from
service to service e.g. reliability is more
important in a bank, empathy in a hospital!
5BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care 5 The
SERVQUAL Questionnaire
- Gap analysis
- The questionnaire is divided into 2 main
sections - Expectations measures what is anticipated in an
ideal service (on a 7-point scale) - Perceptions then measures those aspects of the
service as actually delivered or experienced - Satisfaction (S) is conceptualised as the gap
between expectations and perceptions - So.. SP-E
6BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care 5 The
SERVQUAL Questionnaire
- How are expectations formed ?
- Frequency and length of use of the service- the
gap will narrow over time - Services affect consumers differently (house
repair differs from an operation for cancer) - Expectations are influenced by knowledge held by
producers/consumers about what is feasible - Attitudes (formed by previous bad experiences)
may indicate lower expectations - Feelings are important (e.g. at times of grief)
7BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care 5 The
SERVQUAL Questionnaire
- Three common mismatches are
- Consumer expectations v. management expectations
of what the service should be - Actual service delivery v. information about the
service - Expected service v. perceived service
8BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care 5 The
SERVQUAL Questionnaire
USA General Sample 1990 Dimension
Weight Perceptions Expectations
Gap ----------------------------------------------
---------- Tangibles 0.11 5.54
5.16 0.38 Reliability
0.32 5.16 6.44
-1.28 Responsiveness 0.22 5.20
6.36 -1.16 Assurance 0.19
5.50 6.50 -1.00 Empathy
0.16 5.16 6.28
-1.12 --------------------------------------------
------------ Weighted averages n1936 5.28
6.27 -0.99 (Source calculated
from from Zeithaml, Parasuraman and Berry 1990
)
9BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care 5 The
SERVQUAL Questionnaire
East Midlands, UK OutpatientsJuly
1995 Dimension Weight Perceptions
Expectations Gap ----------------------------
---------------------------------------- Tangibles
0.13 5.21 5.24
-0.03 Reliability 0.26 5.52
6.31 -0.79 Responsiveness 0.21
5.88 6.17 -0.29 Assurance
0.20 5.98 6.39
-0.41 Empathy 0.20 5.66
6.16 -0.50 ----------------------------
---------------------------------------- Weighted
averages n 72 5.67 6.15
-0.48
10BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care 5 The
SERVQUAL Questionnaire
Vaasa,Finland Outpatients Jan-Feb
1996 Dimension Weight Perceptions
Expectations Gap ----------------------------
--------------------------------------- Tangibles
0.18 5.64 6.03
-0.38 Reliability 0.21 5.51
6.04 -0.54 Responsiveness 0.20
5.73 6.12 -0.39 Assurance
0.22 5.83 6.23
-0.40 Empathy 0.19 5.74
6.08 -0.35 ----------------------------
--------------------------------------- Weighted
averages n 135 5.72 6.14
-0.41
11BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care 5 The
SERVQUAL Questionnaire
- General problems with satisfaction scores
- People bring differing expectations into a
situation and have different starting points - To measure quality just through a satisfaction
score may have a limited value - Is it the role of e.g. public services (such as a
probation service) to provide satisfaction ?
12BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care 5 The
SERVQUAL Questionnaire
- Applicability in the public sector
- In education it is possible that a teacher get
high scores for satisfaction (whereas in practice
the course was not sufficiently demanding) - In social services you could (in theory) put
good tenants in one estate and undesirable
tenants in another and this could increase the
satisfaction scores (whilst being
discriminatory!)
13BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care 5 The
SERVQUAL Questionnaire
Measurement scales ---------------------------
--------------------------- D
C B A
we can say that the distance __
__ __ __ AD AB BC
CD If these scales are genuinely ordinal, we
cannot add, subtract, multiply, divide
14BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care 5 The
SERVQUAL Questionnaire
- Reactions to SERVQUAL
- Used in a large number of studies and therefore
some comparability over time/between studies - Not as producer-led as some surveys
- BUT does need to be combined with other measures
(as authors admit) - Gap analysis may map imperfectly onto quality
- Some doubts remain on a technical level as to
what is actually being measured
15BS2914 Quality Management Customer Care 5 The
SERVQUAL Questionnaire
- Calculating SERVQUAL scores
- This can be done in 3 ways
- Manually, for small survey
- Using a spreadsheet for a larger scale model
- Utilise the SERVCALC program which mechanises the
process (but needs the preparation of an ASCII
data file first) - Download program/papers fromhttp//better.statis
tics.ws