What exactly is service quality and how do we measure it? This is an extremely tricky question, and the SERVQUAL questionnaire can help us answer it.
It is very difficult for firms to thrive, in a cut-throat business environment. One of the ways of differentiating yourself is through your service quality. Service quality can make or break any brand. Even if you have got the best product in the market, you need to back it up with an excellent service. High-quality service helps in the success of firms.
Service quality is extremely important for firms that deliver services to their clients. It can increase customer satisfaction levels as well as it can help the firms achieve higher loyalty and profits(Minh et al., 2015). Service quality can be an indicator of what is going right or what is going wrong with your organization. It gives voice to the most important stakeholder of the organization – the customer. Firstly, we will look at an interesting case:
Rackspace is a web hosting company. If you have ever troubleshot our website you would know what kind of mess can be. A customer was on a call with the customer support team of Rackspace. Given the complexity of the problem, it was going to take a long time.
In the middle of this troubleshooting session, The customer care representative heard that the customer said to her colleague that she was feeling hungry. The customer support representative instantly ordered a pizza for the client. Unaware of the order, they were delightedly surprised. This helped reduce the customer’s anger towards the service provider. Additionally, it also helped them in solving the problem faster with renewed energy.
The SERVQUAL questionnaire is one of the most widely used surveys for capturing service quality. Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry developed this scale in 1988. They found that there was no measure of service quality. Therefore, they attempted to developed a measure of service quality. Firstly, the customer feels the service quality. They also proposed that it was different from satisfaction.
Section A: In dissection, please provide some directions for the respondents. You may start by welcoming them to your survey and brief them about the objective of your study. Subsequently, you need to inform them how to interpret the questions. Also, tell them about how to respond to the questions. Generally, responses are taken on 5 point or 7-point scale. The original paper suggests we use a 7-point scale. You can have your responses ranging from strongly-disagree to strongly-agree or from points 1 to 7. 7 being the strongly-agree in that case. Here is a snapshot from the paper for your reference:
The survey is done in two parts:
You may use this template to create your survey form. You may modify it for internal usage within your organization. However, if you want to use it for consulting or providing services to a 3 rd party, please contact us.
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