Quality Management & Customer Care SERVQUAL Questionnaire

1. Quality Management & Customer CareSERVQUAL 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 ?

2. Quality Management & Customer CareSERVQUAL 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

3. Quality Management & Customer CareSERVQUAL 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!

4. Quality Management & Customer CareSERVQUAL 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 conceptualized as the gap between expectations and perceptions • So.. S=E-P

5. Quality Management & Customer CareSERVQUAL 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)

6. Quality Management & Customer CareSERVQUAL Questionnaire Three common mismatches are: • Consumer expectations vs. management expectations of what the service should be • Actual service delivery vs. information about the service • Expected service vs. perceived service

7. Quality Management & Customer CareSERVQUAL 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 [n=1936] 5.28 6.27 -0.99  (Source: calculated from from Zeithaml, Parasuraman and Berry [1990] )

8. Quality Management & Customer CareSERVQUAL Questionnaire UK Hospital Outpatient SurveyDimension 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

9. Quality Management & Customer CareSERVQUAL Questionnaire Finland Hospital Outpatient Survey 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

10. Quality Management & Customer CareSERVQUAL 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 ?

11. Quality Management & Customer CareSERVQUAL 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 housing unit and ‘undesirable’ tenants in another and this could increase the satisfaction scores (while being discriminatory!)

12. Quality Management & Customer CareSERVQUAL 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…

13. Quality Management & Customer CareSERVQUAL Questionnaire Reactions to SERVQUAL • Used in a large number of studies and therefore some comparability over time/between studies • Academic rather than Industry based • Does need to be combined with other measures (such as value analysis, history, competition) • Gap analysis may map imperfectly onto quality • Some doubts remain on a technical level as to what is actually being measured

14. Quality Management & Customer CareSERVQUAL Questionnaire Calculating SERVQUAL scores… This can be easily done… • Easily done using a spreadsheet • Utilize the SERVCALC program which mechanises the process