Quality Service Customer

It is first important to define quality as this is a key term in relation to the report. Quality is very hard to define as it encompasses many different aspects. “Quality has to be defined as conformance to requirements” (Crosby, 1984. pg.60). Crosby argues that quality is about matching to some sort of standard.

As already mentioned above this report will be focusing on service quality. Service quality is different to quality in products as “Quality must be seen in the eyes of the customers, who only recognise what they are getting out of the service and not what the firm puts in” (Naylor 170). This can be seen when looking at restaurants as the average customer is not interested in what goes on behind the scenes in the kitchens and in the office upstairs. They are only interested in the quality of food and service that is delivered direct to them. Service quality is very important for restaurants as there is such a large variety of establishments. This means that an unhappy customer will not remain loyal and will go elsewhere. Lister (1994, Cited by Naylor) developed research which stated that a dissatisfied customer would tell 10 - 20 people of a bad experience, whereas satisfied customers will tell between 3-5 people of a good experience. Therefore it is vital for a restaurant to get it right the first time as a dissatisfied customer can do serious damage to the reputation of the establishment.

The SERVQUAL model was developed by Parasuraman, Zeithmal and Berry, and is a very complex model which allows you to perform a gap analysis of the industry. See appendix. There are a total of seven gaps in the model and these are:

Gap1: Customers' expectations versus management perceptions

Gap2: Management perceptions versus service specifications

Gap3: Service specifications versus service deliver

Gap4: Service delivery versus external communication

Gap5: The discrepancy between customer expectations and their perceptions of the service delivered

Gap6: The discrepancy between customer expectations and employees' perceptions

Gap7: The discrepancy between employee's perceptions and management perceptions.

It has been argued that the best way to assess service quality is by measuring gap 5. This gap focuses on the difference between the service expectations and the perceptions of the customer.

The research was based on the SERVQUAL questionnaire which consisted of 22 questions which were grouped into five dimensions. The dimensions are as follows:

Tangibles - This relates to the physical appearance of people and facilities

Reliability - This relates to whether or not the organisation is doing what they say they will do, on time and to specification

Responsiveness - This relates to the willingness to help and respond to individual requirements

Assurance - possession of the required skills to perform the service and also convey trust, confidence and security.

Empathy - This relates to showing an understanding of customer needs and provide and individualised service.

In the original questionnaire the questions were split up to fit into these five categories. The results for the expectations would be measured against those for the perceptions to reveal the gap between the two figures. The lower the gap the better as there is less of a gap between what the customer expected and the level of service that the customer actually received. The methodology of this report will adapt this model, however as we are focusing on the comparison between different establishments we will not be focusing on the gaps between customer expectation and perceptions. Instead we will use the five dimensions mentioned above to construct the survey and compare the five different establishments together based on the five SERVQUAL dimensions.

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