Constructing innovative service quality for department stores

Abstract

In recent years, service industries in many countries have grown rapidly and now play an important role in national employment and GDP; moreover, as living standards have risen, intangible service qualities have become increasingly important. Thus, as one of the closest commercial links to consumers, department stores should strive to enhance the quality of their services to attract and retain customers and to maintain their competitiveness. In this study, the Retail Service Quality Scale was adopted and the Kano and Refined Kano models were applied to extract service-quality factors; then, the importance-satisfaction (I-S) model was used to clarify the service-quality factors to be improved before employing the theory of inventive problem-solving method to measure innovation. Finally, the service-quality and quality factors falling in the I-S model's excellent area were imported into quality function deployment using the voice of the customer process to establish a department-store house of quality for innovative service. Based on its empirical results, this study proposes a general framework for innovative service-quality for department stores to use in formulating service innovation strategies. The findings and developed framework will improve the performance of department stores by enhancing the quality of service.

Keywords:

• service quality
• service innovation
• Kano model
• I-S model
• QFD