engleski

A Framework for Determining and Prioritizing Critical Factors in Delivering Quality Services

The constantly changing environment forces enterprises to identify new opportunities for claiming competitive advantages and to adapt these changes into their overall strategy. Therefore a respected number of service organisations have identified the need for understanding and implementing tools and methods for economic development. Businesses now see service quality as an important way to differentiate their products from those of competitors. As a result much academic effort is given over to the measurement of service quality. The search for reliable method of measuring service quality has produced an extensive literature. However, there has been little consensus on a methodology, which is of general applicability in all situations. In the absence of any other objective measure, disconfirmation models came to dominate the literature on service quality from the early 1980s. Disconfirmation models have sought to define quality in terms of the difference between an individual’ s expectation of a service and their perceptions of actual service delivery. Pre-eminent among these studies have been the work of Parasuraman et al. and the development of their SERVQUAL instrument. Their research has concentrated on the belief that service quality is measurable but only in the eyes of the consumer because they are the lifeblood of any business. They take the view that service is deemed to be of high quality when consumer’ s expectations are confirmed by subsequent service delivery. Service quality can win and keep customers. A service organisation is likely to face difficult obstacles in its attempt to improve service quality. The key ingredients of service quality improvements are: market and consumer focus ; motivated and well-trained frontline staff ; well-designed process ; development of responsibility and authority to the frontline staff ; clear definition of quality ; effective internal and external communications ; and measurement. Quality problems in service organisations are the result of the mismatch between prior expectations and perceived service quality. Although the gap between expectations and experience is widely considered to be the primary source of service quality problems, it is not clear how the evaluations of expectations and experience occur. This paper has started with the concept of service quality and has demonstrated the model of service quality gaps. SERVQUAL as an effective approach has been studied and its role in the analysis of the difference between customer expectations and perceptions has been highlighted with support of an example. Outcome of the study outline the fact that although SERVQUAL could close one of the important service quality gaps associated with external customer services, it could be extended to close other major gaps and therefore, it could be developed in order to be applied for internal customers, i.e. employees and service providers.

service sector; service quality; SERVQUAL

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