SERVQUAL

Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry are the important personalities who developed SERVQUAL in the mid eighties. The other name for SERVQUAL is RATER which is referred to as a service quality framework. There are ten different aspects of the SERVQUAL which include, responsiveness, reliability, courtesy, and credibility, access, understanding the customer, communication, security and tangibles. The gap that exists between the experience and the expectation of the customer is measured by it.

Later the model RATER was refined in the early nineties. The RATER was acronym for Reliability, Assurance, Tangibles, Empathy and Responsiveness.

Certain people found SERVQUAL to be complex and sometime unreliable statistically. The subjective nature of it was even not appreciated. The introduction of RATER which is considered to be a simpler and yet useful model for easy assessment of the customers’ service experience and even in the qualitative exploration was welcomed by many organizations. Many organizations use this model in their assessment and it is found to an effective model in shaping up the efforts of the organization and in bridging the gap that exist between the perceived and the expected service.

SERVQUAL was appreciated by people like Pons, Morales, Ladhari, and Nyeck due to the attempt it make in conceptualizing and measuring the quality of the service. There are various service industries namely banking, education, healthcare and financial services which use this measuring tool to measure the ability of the researcher.

Criticism on SERVQUAL:

On the other hand the criticism on this method. Francis Buttle has found that the five dimensions of the SERVQUAL are not successful in drawing up a statistical psychological and economical theory. The five dimensions are tangibility, reliability, assurance and responsiveness. Though there are many critisicm on this method, it has been adopted by many organizations to the measure the service quality of the customers. Luis Lages on the other hand noted the higher-level of abstraction in the final decision that are taken in this method. There are similar methods like SERPVA and SERVPERF which has got impact on this method.

The service quality between the service offered and the customer’s expectation is represented by SERVQUAL. It expects respondents to answer the questions about the perceptions of the respondents and the expectation of the respondent. Though not just same as the satisfaction the use of the perceived notions to the actual service received gives an opportunity for SERVQUAL to measure a kind of attitude that is more related to satisfaction.

Lee and Kettinger adopted the SERVQUAL  in order to measure the quality of the service of the IS function late back in 1995.