Services Marketing
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Chapter 22 : Service Quality
Definitions of Quality and its Significance Measuring Service Quality Service Quality Gap Model Service Quality Standards Benchmarking Total Quality Management Strategies for Improving Service Quality Monitoring Service Quality
Chapter Summary
According to Philip B. Crosby, "Quality is conformance to requirements."
However, service organizations should strive to enhance the quality of their
service to exceed customers' expectations, so as to stay ahead of
competitors. Quality is also defined from different perspectives like
user-based approach, product-based approach, operations-based approach,
value-based approach and transcendent view.
Improving service quality enables organizations to win credibility, enhance
customer satisfaction, obtain repeat customers and even charge a premium
price. To measure the quality of service offered, service organizations have
to measure both the technical and functional components of the service.
According to a research conducted by Zeithaml, Berry and Parasuraman, five
important dimensions of service (as viewed by customers) that need to be
evaluated are tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy.
There can be many reasons for the differences between the quality expected
by the customer and the quality delivered by the organization. Organizations
need to establish certain service standards so that all the employees, as a
team, strive to achieve them, and offer superior quality service to
customers. Service organizations can use techniques like TQM and
benchmarking to improve their service quality.
Striving to offer reliable service and implementing effective service
recovery methods are some of the strategies used by service organizations to
improve service quality. Apart from using quality management techniques and
strategies, a service organization should continually monitor its service
quality to ensure that customers consistently receive the level of quality
service that they expect from the organization.
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