Quality education service: put your feet in their shoes

Abstract

This study aims to integrate importance-performance and gap analysis (IPGA), decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL), and quality function deployment (QFD) to develop a three-tiered service-quality-improvement model in order to identify critical educational-service-quality deficiencies in hospitality, tourism, and leisure undergraduate programmes and thereafter to formulate applicable service-improvement strategies. Seven hundred and eighty-six valid questionnaires were returned. The IPGA analysis showed 12 service-quality attributes were in the area of ‘Concentrate here’. Out of the 12 attributes, four main cause attributes were found with the DEMATEL analysis. Furthermore, six service-improvement strategies were developed based on experts' in-depth interviews and QFD analysis. The effects of these improvement strategies were fully discussed in the context.

Keywords:

• educational service quality
• IPGA
• DEMATEL
• QFD and HTLP

Acknowledgement

The authors thank for the support by the National Science Council of Taiwan under grant number NSC 98-2410-H-216-001.