BAM

ASSIGNMENT 2

SERVQUAL

Abhishek Kakralia
39328
Marketing B

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Service quality and customer satisfaction are very important concepts that companies must
understand in order to remain competitive in business and hence grow. It is very important for
companies to know how to measure these constructs from the consumers perspective in order
to better understand their needs and hence satisfy them. Service quality is considered very
important because it leads to higher customer satisfaction, profitability, reduced cost, customer
loyalty and retention.

The SERVQUAL model was made of ten dimensions of service quality when created; tangibles,
reliability, responsiveness, communication, credibility, security, competence, courtesy,
understanding the customer, and access, but later on these dimensions were reduced to five
because some dimensions were overlapping (communication, credibility, security, competence,
courtesy, understanding customers and access) and they included,
Tangibles- physical facilities, equipment, and staff appearance
Reliability- ability to perform the promised service dependably and accurately
Responsiveness- willingness to help customers and provide prompt service
Assurance- knowledge and courtesy of employees and their ability to inspire trust and
confidence
Empathy- caring, individual attention the firm provides its customers

Emapthy

Assurance Tangibles

SERVQUAL

Responsiv
Reliability
eness

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It is recommended that the SERVQUAL model is a good scale to use when measuring service
quality in various specific industries but that it is appropriate to choose the most important
dimensions of this model that fit to that particular service being measured in order to assure
reliable and valid results.

The SERVQUAL model is used as main concept to assess service quality and customer satisfaction.
This means that customer satisfaction could be measured using the various service quality
dimensions. This is because it is important to be aware of how customers perceive service quality
in grocery stores and the factors that affect these perceptions.

Measuring Service Quality using SERVQUAL model

Data Collection & Scare Purification

Two stages of data collection and refinement applied on the 97-item instrument. Broadly, the
first stage laid emphasis on narrowing down the instrument and exploring the dimensionality of
the scale. The second stage helped in confirmation and included re-evaluating the condensed
scales dimensionality and reliability.
The first stage included data collection and approximately 200 adult respondents in order to
further refine the scale with 97 items. Other than being divided equally between male and female
and respondents were also spread across five different service categories. The respondents who
were screened and qualified indulged in a 2 part questionnaire consisting of a 97 statement
expectations part followed by a 97-statement perceptions part. The instrument was further
purified by a detailed analysis of the pooled data.

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In the second stage, data was gathered involving service quality of four nationally known firms
a bank, a credit card company, a firm offering appliance repair and maintenance services and a
long distance telephone company. The objective of the second part of the second stage was to
assess the trustworthiness of the 34-item scale when implemented to measure the service
quality of the four firms.
Assessment of SERVQUALs validity

The scale needs to satisfy particular conceptual and empirical criteria in order to be accepted as
a credible construct validity. Factors like high reliability and internal consistency are imperative
but necessarily not sufficient conditions to assess the validity of a scale. Face/content validity and
convergent validity are quite important. In the procedure developing SERVQUAL the face validity
was validated while the convergent validity was assessed and passed the validity quotient
empirically. SERVQUALs validity was also assessed by exploring whether the construct calculated
by it was empirically associated with measures of other conceptually related variables.
Application of SERVQUAL
SERVQUAL is most valuable when it is used regularly to assess service quality trends in the service
industry and when applied in accordance with other forms of service quality measurement. It can
also be used to analyze a stated firms quality along each of the specific 5 service dimensions by
averaging the difference scores of items making up the dimensions. These are just few of the
various applications mentioned in the research paper.
Conclusion
The SERVQUAL model has numerous potential applications, which can assist a wide range of
service and retailing organizations in assessing consumer expectations about and perceptions of
service quality.