Determining critical service quality from the view of performance influence

Abstract

Service quality is regarded as the key factor in obtaining competitive advantage. However, service and physical products differ fundamentally, and the voice of customers is generally fuzzy and non-quantitative, often leading to errors in the measurement of service quality. Based on the view of performance influence, this study applied fuzzy linguistics in a questionnaire to gauge the satisfaction of customers towards individual service items as well as their overall satisfaction and constructed a service performance influence matrix (SPIM) to identify service items of poor quality. We also employed the SPIM to compare the performance of the target company with that of its competitors. This method enables service-oriented companies to improve their service quality performance effectively and develops strategies to prevent their occurrence. A case study involving a Taiwanese bicycle retail outlet is discussed to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework in practice.

Keywords:

• service quality
• fuzzy linguistics
• service performance influence matrix
• customer satisfaction
• competitiveness

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank the Editor Professor Jens J. Dahlgaard and anonymous referees for their helpful comments and careful reading, which significantly improved the presentation of this paper. This work is partially supported by Taiwan's National Science Council grant NSC 101-2622-H-167-002-CC3 and 102-2221-E-167-028.