The Service-Quality Puzzle Leonard L. Berry, A. Parasuraman, and Valarie A. Zeithaml Leonard L. Berry ‘and A. Parasuraman are Foley's/Federated Professors of Retalin and. Marketing University, Studies, at Texas A&d ‘ollege Station. Professor Berry i alzo the director at the Center for Retailing Stulies at Texas A&M. Val A. Zeithaml is a visiting associate profes sor of marketing at Duke University, Dur- ham, North Cafolina, The authors wrote “Quality Counts in Services, Too,” pub- lished in the May-June 1985 Busines! Ho- rizons, The current article presents data from their ongoing study of service qual ity Service quality can often make the differ- ence between a business’s success and fail- ure. But what causes problems, and what can a business do to eliminate them? The answers are here. lompeting organizations pro- vide the same types of ser- -vice—airline transportation to Chicago, tax-return preparation, shampoo and blow-dry services—but they do not provide the same quality of service. No one knows this better than customers. To customers, com- peting service enterprises may look alike, but they do not feel alike. In fact, service quality has become the great differentiator, the most powerful competitive weapon most service organizations possess." As Stanley Marcus once remarked to a group of bankers, “The dollar bills the customer gets from the tellers in four banks are the same. What is different are the tellers.” What, however, makes the tellers different? Quality has received much attention, but many service firms continue to have trouble delivering, even defining it. We have studied the issue of ser- vvice quality since 1983 to try toanswer three fundamental questions: © What is service quality? © What causes service-quality problems? © What can service organizations do to improve quality? Copyright © 2001 All Rights Reserved Our work has included both qual- itative and quantitative research on customers, employees, and managers of businesses offering retail banking, securities brokerage, product repair- and-maintenance, bank credit-card, and long-distance telephone services. (For details of our research approach, see the box.) This article outlines our most im- portant findings. We will begin at the beginning by defining the compo- nents of service quality. We will then explain some of the organizational factors that can undermine service quality and illustrate these points with a case study of a large U.S. bank. Fi- nally, we will recommend ways to en- hance quality throughout a service organization, WHAT IS SERVICE QUALITY? vality is often defined as “conformance to specifica- tions,’” but this phrase can ‘be misleading. Quality is conformance to customer specifica tions; it is the customer’s definition of quality, not management's, that counts.‘Dusiness Horizons / September-October 1988, a Research Methodology struments to measure constructs the reliability and validity of the that are not directly observable.’ We condensed scale, we administered Our research on service quality developed 97 items, fleshing out _ it to four independent samples of consisted of two distinct, sequen- the 10 dimensions of service qual- approximately 190 customers each, tial phases. The first phase was ity identified in our first phase. We 10 gather data on the service qual- qualitative and focused on how then recast each item into a pair of ity of four nationally known firms: oth customers and service-firm statements—one to measure ex- a bank, a credit-card issuer, an ap- executives perceive and evaluate _pectations about firms in general _pliance repair-and-maintenance service quality. within the service category being firm, and a long-distance tele- To lear about customers’ views investigated (sample statement: phone company. Analysis of data on service quality, we conducted “When these firms promise to do from the four samples led to ad- 12 focus-group interviews, three for something by a certain time, they ditional refinement of the instru- each of four selected services: retail should do so”), and the other to ment and confirmed its reliability banking, credit cards, securities measure perceptions about the and validity. The final instrument brokerage, and appliance repair __ particular firm whose service qual- consisted of 22items, spanning the and maintenance. To ascertain how ity was being assessed (sample _ five dimensions of service quality Service-firm executives view ser- statement: “When XYZ promises described in the article: tangibles, vice quality, we conducted in- to do something by a ceriain time, reliability, responsiveness, assur- depth, face-to-face interviews with it does so”). A’ seven-point scale ance, and empathy. ‘marketing, operations, and cus- ranging from 7 (strongly agree) to. To accomplish our second re- tomer-relations executives in each 1 (strongly disagree) accompanied search objective we conducted a of four nationally recognized com- each statement. comprehensive case study of a na- panies—one from cach of the four We refined and shortened the 97- tionally known bank. We selected Service categories we investigated. item instrument through aseries of three bank regions (with about 12 The first phase of the research iterative data-collection and -anal- branches per region) and did sep- indicated that customers evaluate ysis steps. We performed this in- arate focus-group interviews with service quality by mentally com- strument purification to eliminate tellers, customer-service represen- paring their perceptions of deliv- items that failed to discriminate tatives, lending personnel, and éred services with their well among respondents with dif- branch managers from within the expectations of the service firms. fering quality perceptions about regions (a total of seven focus- ‘They do this along ten distinct di- firms in several service categories. group interviews). We also con- mensions (reliability, responsive- We gathered data for the initial re- ducted in-depth interviews with ness, competence, access, courtesy, finement of the 97-item instrument more than a dozen middle and sen- communication, credibility, secu: from a quota sample of 200 cus- ior managers having responsibili- rity, understanding/knowing the tomers, divided equally between ties for the branch system, From customer, tangibles). This inquiry males and females and represent- the focus-group and in-depth-in- also revealed key gaps within ser- ing recent users of one of the fol- _ terview data we developed a struc vice firms (such as the inability of lowing five services: appliance tured questionnaire that was sent customer-contact personnel to meet repair and maintenance, retail to all customer-contact personnel service-quality specifications laid banking, long-distance telephone, _in the three regions. We received down by management) that could securities brokerage, and credit completed questionnaires from 237 have a bearing on service quality cards. We converted the raw ques- employees, or 55 percent of the as perceived by customers. tionnaire data into perception-mi- sample. Finally, we mailed the ser- ‘The second phase of our re- nus-expectation scores for the vice-quality questionnaire to a ran- search, which was more empirical, various items. These difference dom sample of the bank's focused on two objectives: devel: scores could range from +6 to -6, customers within the regions. We ‘oping a comprehensive but parsi-_ with more-posilive scores repre- received completed questionnaires monious instrument formeasuring senting higher perceived service from 138 customers, 14 percent of customer perceptions of service quality. We analyzed the differ- this sample. quality, and gaining a more in- ence scores using item-to-total cor- depth understanding of organiza- relation analysis and _ factor tional shortfalls that have an im- analysis. These analyses resulted pact on service quality and how in the elimination of roughly two- 1. Conceptual and technical detail ofthis such shortfalls can be corrected. To thirds of the original items and the procedure can be found in Gilbert A. Chr Sccomplish the fst objecive, we consolidation of several overlap- ‘il “A Padi for Developing Bet followed well-established proce- ping quality dimensions into new, Journal o Marketing Rese, February 199, dures fordeveloping structured in- combined dimensions, To verify pp. 6433. Copyright © 2001 All Rights ReservedThe Service-Quality Puzzle Customers assess service quality by ‘comparing what they want or expect to what they actually get or perceive they are gelting, To earn a reputation for quality, an organization must meet—or exceed—customer expecta tions. And what do service customers ex pect? Our research suggests these ex- pectations cover five areas: © Tangibles: the physical facilities, equipment, appearance of personnel; © Reliability: the ability to perform the desired service dependably, ac- curatety, and consistently; © Responsiveness: the willingness to provide prompt service and help customers; © Assurance: employees’ knowl- edge, courtesy, and ability to convey ttust and confidence; and ¢ Empathy: the provision of car- ing, individualized attention to cus- tomers. We asked users of credit-card, re- pair-and-maintenance, long-distance telephone, and retail banking services torate the importance of each of these dimensions on a scale of 1 (not at all important) to 10 (extremely impor- tant). We found—not surprisingly — that all were considered important. ‘The scores for tangibles, however, ranged from a relatively low 7.14 to 8.56, while reliability, responsive- hess, assurance, and empathy re- ceived average scores well above 9 for all of the services studied. These re- sults are presented in Table 1. Reliability clearly emerged as the ‘most important dimension, regard- less of the service being studied. As shown in the table, 61 percent of the long-distance telephone customers, 57 percent of the repair-service cus- tomers, 49 percent of the credit-card customers, and 42 percent of the bank ‘customers considered this dimension most important. When we used the same questionnaire with a second sample of bank customers, the results were similar: 58 percent chose relia- bility as the most important dimen- sion of service. The customer's message to service providers is clear: Be responsive, be reassuring, be empathetic, and most of all, be reliable—do what you say you are going to do. This is more easily ac- Table 1 Importance of Service-Quality Dimensions in Four Service Sectors es Crit Card Customers (=i Tangibles Rela Responalvenes Assurance Empathy Repu’ Maintenance Customers (wes) “Tangibles Relinbly Responsiveness Assurance Empathy Long: istace Telephone Customers (ozs bes Relabity Responsiveness ‘Assurance Empathy Bank Customers @=17) Tangibles Rely Responsiveness Assurance Empathy * Scale ranges from 1 (rot at all important) lo 10 (extremely important) knowledged and understood than ac- complished. There is another message: human performance playsa major roleincus- tomers’ perceptions of service qual- ity. Three of the five dimensions— responsiveness, assurance, and em- pathy—result directly from human performance. Moreover, reliability often depends largely on human per- formance. Clearly, if one is to under- stand and avoid service-quality problems one must contend with the people factor WHAT CAUSES SERVICE- QUALITY PROBLEMS? tustomers’ expectations for a particular service shape their sessment of the quality of that service. When there is a discrep- ancy between customers’ expecta- tions and management's understanding Copyright © 2001 All Rights Reserved Percentage of Respondents ‘Mean Importance Inticating Rating on 10- Dimension is Point Soule Most Important 743 06 945 486 937 8 9.25 75 909 36 84s, 12 9.64 572 954 199 9.62 20 9.30 96 744 06 9.67 6.6 9.57 16.0 9.29 26 925 103 8.56 a oat 421 9.34 180 9.18 136 930 Bi of customer expectations, perceived service quality will suffer. Manage- ment’s failure to identify customer desires accurately is one kind of qual- ity gap. Even when management fully understands customer expectations, service-quality problems may occur, For one thing, management may be- lieve that it is impossible or imprac- tical to meet all of the expectations. We interviewed executives at a re- pairand-maintenance firm who knew they would have trouble meeting cus- tomer demand for prompt service during the summer months, when air conditioners, lawn mowers, and bi- cycles are in heavy use. Yet they said they could not increase staff for the demand peak. Asked why, one ex- ecutive answered, “Summer is when our technicians like to take their va- cations.” The firm did not set its ser- vice specifications according to 37