Applying importance-performance analysis to analyze service quality:a case of two coach companies

Abstract

Importance-performance analysis (IPA) was applied to evaluate the service quality of Kuo-Kuang Motor Transport Company by identifying its major strengths and weaknesses. Nine items are classified as major strengths, while five items are viewed as major weaknesses. In addition, the benchmarking philosophy is taken into consideration the previous importance-performance analysis by performance ratio to compute the performance of Kuo-Kuang Motor Transport Company divided by the performance of United Bus. In doing so, the number of items classified as relative strengths and weaknesses of Kuo-Kuang Motor Transport Company are eleven and three, respectively. Because each survey might include the sampling error, this study further uses t test for the mean difference to determine whether these relative major strengths and weaknesses of Kuo-Kuang Motor Transport Company are significantly different. The results show that seven items are considered the relative strengths and no relative major weaknesses are significantly different compared with United Bus when t test for the mean difference is performed.

Keywords and phrases:

• Service quality
• importance-performance analysis
• performance ratio
• benchmarking
• strength
• weakness
• coach company