MODEL TO ANALYSE SERVICE QUALITY:SERVQUAL

Quality has come to be recognized as a strategic tool for attaining operational efficiency and improved business performance. This is true for both the goods and services sectors.
However, the problem with management of service quality in service firms is that quality is not easily identifiable and measurable due to inherent characteristics of services which make them different from goods. Various definitions of the term ‘service quality’ have been proposed in the past and, based on different definitions, different scales for measuring service quality have been put forward.

Quality has come to be recognized as a strategic tool for attaining operational efficiency and improved business performance.
This is true for the services sector too. Quality have positive relationship with profits, increased market share,
return on investment, customer satisfaction, and future purchase intentions. One obvious conclusion of these studies is that firms with superior quality products outperform
those marketing inferior quality products.
Quality in the context of service industries
has been conceptualized differently and based on different conceptualizations, alternative scales have been proposed for service quality measurement.
Based on the conceptualization of Difference
between consumer expectations of ‘what they want’ and their perceptions of ‘what they get.’ a srvice quality measurement scale is proposed called ‘SERVQUAL’.

SERVQUAL

SERVQUAL scale is the gap model proposed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry(1985, 1988).

SERVQUAL is a multi-item scale developed to assess customer perceptions of service quality in service and retail businesses. The scale decomposes the notion of service quality into five constructs as follows:

* Tangibles - physical facilities, equipment, staff appearance, etc.
* Reliability - ability to perform service dependably and accurately
* Responsiveness - willingness to help and respond to customer need
* Assurance - ability of staff to inspire confidence and trust
* Empathy - the extent to which caring individualized service is given

SERVQUAL represents service quality as the discrepancy between a customer's expectations for a service offering and the customer's perceptions of the service received, requiring respondents to answer questions about both their expectations and their perceptions. The use of perceived as opposed to actual service received makes the SERVQUAL measure an attitude measure that is related to, but not the same as, satisfaction.