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SERVICE
QUALITY
INTRODUCTION

 One among the most important element of

customers perceptions is the service quality.
 Service quality is the dominant element for
customers in evaluating pure services such as
education, health care, and banking.
 Customer judge service quality based on their
perception on technical outcome, process, and
service environment.

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DIMENSIONS OF SERVICE
QUALITY
 The dimensions has been found based on the
research made by Valarie et al.
 These dimensions are applied on across various
services.
1. Reliability
2. Responsiveness
3. Assurance
4. Empathy
5. Tangibles
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DIMENSIONS OF SERVICE QUALITY…

1. Reliability - Delivering on Promises.

 This is the most important determinants of
perceptions of service to many customers.
 This refers to an ability of the firm or service
provider to perform the promised service
dependably and accurate.
 The company should deliver services as
promised in their marketing communications
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 DIMENSIONS OF SERVICE QUALITY…

2. Responsiveness - Being willing to help

 This means willingness to help customers and
provide prompt services.
 During service failure customers need assistance,
and their satisfaction depends on how long and
how easy it is to get assistance and how they are
taken care of.
 The type of support they receive and how the
problem are handled are what customers treat as
relevant to their overall satisfaction.
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DIMENSIONS OF SERVICE QUALITY…

3. Assurance - Inspiring Trust and

Confidence
 In services which are having high risk
such as legal, banking, insurance, health
etc, the employees knowledge to
respond to customer’s questions,
consistently courteous is very important.
 Customers can feel safe in their
transactions if the contact personnel has
an ability to install confidence in them.
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 DIMENSIONS OF SERVICE QUALITY…

4. Empathy- Treating Customers as

individual
 This is defined as caring, individualized
attention that the firms provide to their
customers.
 The essence of empathy is conveying
through personalized or customized
services, that customers are unique and
special and their needs are understood.
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 DIMENSIONS OF SERVICE QUALITY…

5. Tangibles – Representing the service physically

This is one among the major dimensions used by
the new customers to evaluate the service quality.
Tangibles includes appearance of physical
facilities, equipment, tools, personnel, etc.
This is used to enhance company image, provide
continuity and signal quality to customer.

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9 E-SERVICE QUALITY

DIMENSIONS OF E-
SERVICE QUALITY
 INTRODUCTION
 Due to the technological advancement, most
of the companies are doing business online
and therefore it is important to understand how
customers are judging the services quality on
the website.
 The dimensions used in evaluating e-service
quality differ from those of services which are
not available online and has been discovered
through E-S-QUAL study.
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 DIMENSIONS OF E-SERVICE QUALITY

 This dimension has been categorized into;-

1. Core Service Evaluation
2. Service Recovery Evaluation
 Core Service Evaluation has 4 dimensions
while Service Recovery Evaluation has 3
dimensions, and therefore in total we have 7
dimensions of e-service quality

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DIMENSIONS OF E-SERVICE QUALITY…

1. Core Service Evaluation is focusing

on how the customers judge the website
without having a problem or questions
The dimensions used are;-
i. Efficiency
ii. Fulfillment
iii. System availability
iv. Privacy
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DIMENSIONS OF E-SERVICE QUALITY…

2. Service Recovery Evaluation is

focusing on how the customers judge
the recovery service when they have
problems and questions.
The dimensions used are ;-
i. Responsiveness
ii. Compensation
iii. Contact

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DIMENSIONS OF E-SERVICE QUALITY…

i.Efficiency
 This refers to how ease and fast in
accessing and using the site.

ii. Fulfillment
 The extent to which the site’s promises
about order delivery and item
availability are fulfilled.
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DIMENSIONS OF E-SERVICE QUALITY…

iii. System availability

 This refers to the correct technical
functioning of the site.
iv. Privacy
 Customers tend to judge the quality based on
the degree to which the site is safe and
protect their information.

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 DIMENSIONS OF E-SERVICE QUALITY…

v. Responsiveness
 The effective handling of problems and
returns through the site.
vi. Compensation
 The degree to which the site compensates
customers for problem
vii. Contact
 The availability of assistance through
telephone or online Representatives.
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THE GAPS MODEL OF
SERVICE QUALITY
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INTRODUCTION
The Gaps model positions the key concepts,
strategies, and decisions in service
marketing.
Basically there are 5 gaps which has been
classified into The Customer Gap and The
Provider Gaps.
The firm should put initiative to close the
gap in order to satisfy the customers.

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19
THE CUSTOMER
GAP
 THE CUSTOMER GAP
 The customer gap is the difference between
customer expectations and perceptions.
 Customer expectations are standards or
reference points that customers bring into the
service experience, whereas customer
perception are subjective assessment of
actual service experiences.

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THE CUSTOMER GAP…

 The sources of customer expectations are

marketer –controlled factors such as
Advertising, Sales promotion and pricing
and other factors such as word of mouth, past
experience and personal needs which a
marketer has a limited ability to affect.
 When the expectations and perceptions
match – customer will perceive that they
received what they thought would and
should be.
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THE CUSTOMER GAP

Expected
Service

customer gap

Perceived
Service

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23
THE PROVIDER
GAPS
 THE PROVIDER GAPS
 The model suggests four gaps under the
provider gaps.
 These are;-
1. The Listening Gap
2. The Service design and Standards Gap
3. The Service performance Gap
4. The Communication Gap

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GAP 1:THE LISTENING GAP

 This is the difference between the customer

expectations of service and the company
understanding of those expectations.
 A firm can not be able to satisfy a customer
if customer expectations are unknown.
 Many firms lack an accurate understanding
of exactly of their customers expectations
because of the various reasons.
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 GAP 1:THE LISTENING GAP…

 The following are the reasons why most firms

fail to meet customers expectations;-
1. Inadequate customer research orientation.
2. Lack of upward communications
3. Insufficient relationship focus.
4. Inadequate service recovery.
 Decision makers need to understand customer
expectation in order to avoid making bad
decision and wrong allocation of resources.
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 Customer expectations
 Inadequate customer research orientation
o Insufficient customer research, lack of market research
 Lack of upward communications
o Lack of interaction between mgt and customers,
o Insufficient comm. between Managers and contact personnel
 Insufficient relationship focus
o Lack of market segmentation
o Focus on new customers and making transactions
 Inadequate service recovery
o Failure to make changes when things go wrong,
o Lack of listening complaints

Company perceptions of customer expectations 27

GAP 2: THE SERVICE DESIGN AND
STANDARDS GAP

 This is the difference between company

understanding of customer expectations
and the development of customer driven
service designs and standards.
 The firm should only be able to deliver
superior service if it has an accurate
perceptions of customers expectations.

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GAP 2: THE SERVICE DESIGN AND STANDARDS GAP ….

 The main reason for this gap is the

management sometimes tend to believe that
customers expectations are unreasonable or
unrealistic.
 The only way to avoid this gap is to clearly
design services without oversimplification,
incompleteness, subjectivity and bias.
 The most common tool used in service
development is the service blueprint.
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 Customer - driven service designs and standards

 Poor service design

o Unsystematic new service development process
o Failure to connect service design to service positioning
 Absence of customer-driven standards
o Lack of customer-driven service standards
o Absence of formal process for setting service quality goals.
o Absence of process mgt to focus on customer requirements.
 Inappropriate physical evidence and servicescape
o Servicescape design doesn’t meet customer and employee needs.
o Inadequate maintenance and updating of the servicescape

Management perceptions of customer expectations 30

GAP 3: THE SERVICE PERFORMANCE GAP

 This is the difference between the

development of customer driven service
standards and actual service performance by
the company employees.
 Basically service standards must be backed
by appropriate resources such as people,
system and technology.
 Lack of appropriate resources has direct
impact on the service standards.
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THE SERVICE PERFORMANCE GAP…
 The firm must have people, systems and
process to ensure that service delivery actually
matches the design and standards in place.
 Employee must be measured and compensated
based on their performance along with the
standards.
 In order to close this gap, the manager must
ensure that all resources needed to achieve
standards are in place.
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 Customer driven service designs and standards

 Deficiencies in human resources policies

o Ineffective recruitment, lack of empowerment, control & team work
o Poor employee – technology job fit, role ambiguity and role conflict
 Failure to match supply and demand
o Overreliance on price to smooth demand, inappropriate customer mix
 Customers not fulfilling roles
o Customers lack knowledge of their roles and responsibilities.
o Customers negatively impact each other
 Problems with service intermediaries
o Difficulty controlling quality & consistency,
o Channel conflict over costs & rewards, objectives and performance

Service delivery 33
GAP 4: THE COMMUNICATION GAP

 This is the difference between service

delivery and the service provider external
communications.
 Customers expectations is raised by the
promise made by the company through its
media such as advertising, sales team and
other communications.
 Refer to our previous discussions on explicit
service promises.
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 Service delivery
 Lack of IMC
o Viewing each communication as independent
o Absence of strong internal marketing.
 Ineffective management of customers expectations
o Not adequately educating customers, not managing customers
expectation through communications.
 Overpromising
o Overpromising in ads, personal selling and physical evidence cues
 Inadequate horizontal communications
o Insufficient comm. between sales & advertising VS operations dpts.
 Inappropriate pricing
o High prices that raise customers expectations, price not tied to
customers perceptions of value.
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External communication to customers
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