Designing Quality Service
Topic Review Question
Topic 6: Designing Quality Service
1. Explain the reason why quality techniques in the service industry are less mature than quality techniques for manufactured products. Give your opinion, what can be done to bring quality techniques for the services industry up to a higher level?
As discussed in Question 3, product quality has been in existence far longer than service quality. Tools such as SERVUAL and gap analysis are being pressed into use. Concepts like the interrelationships between the components of a service, service quality definitions and tracking are new. Some service-connected industries are showing major growth. Stock brokerages have become major companies and are heavily committed to using highly technical solutions to their problems. This growth in size of many service companies will be contingent on their ability to provide an effective level of service. As was said before, the customer or client is more involved and more likely to be a coproducer in a service relationship. Poor quality will rapidly become self-evident.
2. What is the SERVQUAL instrument, how is it used, and what does it reveal?
The SERVQUAL instrument is a customer survey that is used for assessing service quality. It consists of two 22 question surveys measured on a Likert scale that address each of the five dimensions of service quality.
Customers are given the surveys and instructed to answer all 22 questions in each. The survey administrator then determines average responses for the survey items and averages those averages for each of the five dimensions of service quality.
The two parts of the survey, an expectations section and a perceptions section, are to be compared. These two sections, and the differences between the two, are used to assess gaps that might exist in the company’s service delivery system. If a large gap is revealed on one or more of the five service quality constructs, then the company knows it should target
Topic 6: Designing Quality Service
1. Explain the reason why quality techniques in the service industry are less mature than quality techniques for manufactured products. Give your opinion, what can be done to bring quality techniques for the services industry up to a higher level?
As discussed in Question 3, product quality has been in existence far longer than service quality. Tools such as SERVUAL and gap analysis are being pressed into use. Concepts like the interrelationships between the components of a service, service quality definitions and tracking are new. Some service-connected industries are showing major growth. Stock brokerages have become major companies and are heavily committed to using highly technical solutions to their problems. This growth in size of many service companies will be contingent on their ability to provide an effective level of service. As was said before, the customer or client is more involved and more likely to be a coproducer in a service relationship. Poor quality will rapidly become self-evident.
2. What is the SERVQUAL instrument, how is it used, and what does it reveal?
The SERVQUAL instrument is a customer survey that is used for assessing service quality. It consists of two 22 question surveys measured on a Likert scale that address each of the five dimensions of service quality.
Customers are given the surveys and instructed to answer all 22 questions in each. The survey administrator then determines average responses for the survey items and averages those averages for each of the five dimensions of service quality.
The two parts of the survey, an expectations section and a perceptions section, are to be compared. These two sections, and the differences between the two, are used to assess gaps that might exist in the company’s service delivery system. If a large gap is revealed on one or more of the five service quality constructs, then the company knows it should target