Measuring Customer Satisfaction by Applying the Approach of SERVQUAL for Quality Service Improvement in the Public Sector

Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2010 in the subject Business economics - Operations Research, grade: A-, University of Auckland (Management), course: Advanced Operations Management, language: English, abstract: This literature review contains the conceptual background including a definition and model of SERVQUAL, a critique followed by a review of SERVQUAL in the public sector. Conclusion and implications for future research follow.

Since market competition has become more antagonistic, the awareness of customer service has risen. The last two decades show that quality of service ought to be the key of success of the marketing strategy. Therefore, the vendor should get a chance to measure it in order to rate his competitiveness. According to Zeithaml et al. (1988), research and company experience reveals that advanced service quality generates calculable gains in returns, cost savings and market share. Thus, there was the motivation to develop a service quality model.

Recently, the established and well-known model of measurement of service quality is SERVQUAL, established as a tool by Parasuraman et al. (1985; 1988). Furthermore, it has been widely used since the mid-eighties in several case studies. Parasuraman et al. (1985) are the pioneers of service quality measurement, and they developed it further over the years through a series of academic papers to be selectively considered in the following literature review. Nyeck et al. (2002) stated that several researchers in this area emphasize the explanation of the perceived quality by using SERVQUAL approach due to its popularity caused ¿by its ease of use and by adaptability to diverse service sectors¿ (p.102).