Under the SERVQUAL model, discuss the 10 aspects of service qualityby creating situations that will best explain each. (Indicate your references)
Answers
Explanation:
According to Asubonteng et al., (1996), due to intense competition and the hostility of
environmental factors, service quality has become a cornerstone marketing strategy for
companies. This highlights how important improving service quality is to organisations
for their survival and growth since it could help them tackle these challenges they face
in the competitive markets. This means that service-based companies are compelled to
provide excellent services to their customers in order to have a sustainable competitive
advantage. There is however, a need for these organisations to understand what service
quality is in order to attain their objectives.
In service marketing literature, service quality is generally defined as the overall
assessment of a service by the customers, (Eshghi et al., 2008, p.121) or the extent to
which a service meets customer’s needs or expectations, Asubonteng et al., (1996).
Parasuraman et al., (1985) define service quality as “The discrepancy between
consumers’ perceptions of services offered by a particular firm and their expectations
about firms offering such services”. If what is perceived is below expectation, consumer
judges quality as low and if what is perceived is meets or exceeds expectation then
consumer sees quality to be high. Critical component of service quality identified are;
consumer’s expectation which is seen as what they feel service provider should offer
and this is influenced by his/her personal needs, past experience, word-of-mouth and
service provider’s communications, Parasuraman et al., (1985, p.49). However, this
meaning of expectation is that of service quality literature which is different from
expectation in the customer satisfaction literature which defines expectation as
predictions made by consumer about what is likely to happen during an impending
transaction. Consumers’ perception of performance is what he/she experiences,
(Parasuraman et al., 1988, p.17). Generally, it is interesting to study expectations and
experiences of consumers in many different contexts. It is of particular interest to study
these concepts in the context of grocery stores because grocery stores play an
instrumental role in the lives of people and it is primordial for firms to know what
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consumers expect and perceive from these stores. Therefore, in this study, we will
define consumer’s expectation as what consumers think should be offered by the ideal
grocery stores while consumer’s perception will be defined as what they experienced in
the grocery stores and this is assessed after the performance. In addition,