Literature Review on Dominos

A consumer’s perception of quality levels has long been a focus for marketing literature research. For example, the consumer’s judgment concerning an entity’s overall level of excellence or superiority has been used as a measurement of perceived quality . Objective measures of quality, measured by elements such as the “conformance to requirements” or “freedom from deficiencies” have been defined as the basis for quality assessment. However, these objective measures are difficult to translate into methods for assessing service (as opposed to product) quality. This difficulty led to the development of ServQual, intended to assess user perceptions of quality in a service environment.

From the methodological point of view: Respondents fatigue at having to rate all service attributes twice. They also tend to rate most dimensions as being highly important, since they are unable to distinguish between aspects that are very and extremely important Respondents may interpret the expectation / importance questions in different ways.

[Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry (1988) “SERVQUAL: A Multiple-Item Scale for Measuring Consumer Perceptions of Service Quality.” Journal of Retailing (64.1) 12-37]developed the original 22 item ServQual scale with questions intended to assess five specific dimensions (tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy). [Parasuraman et al. (1985)] identify the 10 core components of service quality as reliability (consistent performance and dependability), responsiveness (willingness/readiness to serve), competence (possessing knowledge and skills), access (approachability and ease of contact), courtesy (politeness, consideration and friendliness of staff), communication (updating and listening to customers), credibility (trustworthy and reputable, with customer interests at heart), security (freedom from danger and risk), customer knowledge (understanding needs and personalized attention), as well as tangibles (facilities and physical features). The ServQual instrument utilizes a “gap (or difference)[ Carman, James M. (1990) “Consumer Perceptions of Service Quality]: score”] analysis methodology, wherein the user’s expectations for service quality are assessed at the same time as the user’s perception of the actual system performance. The difference between these two scores (performance minus expectation) is used as the basis of analysis.

Multiple Marketing-oriented researchers have identified factor stability as a problem for the ServQual instrument’s assessment of service quality. At least two studies have found evidence that ServQual represents a unidimensional model. [Charles W. Lamb. (1991) “An Evaluation of the ServQual Scales in a Retailing Setting”,] A 1993 study concluded that the performance-only element of ServQual (referred to as ServPerf) “performs about as well as ServQual itself”. The authors found that “Overall, the nomological validity evidence somewhat favors the non-difference score measure to the ServQual measure”.

CONCERNS ABOUT SERVQUAL’S UNDERLYING DIMENSIONS
One of the aims of this study involves the use of SERVQUAL instrument in order to ascertain any actual or perceived gaps between customer expectations and perceptions of the service offered. Another aim of this paper is to point out how management of service improvement can become more logical and integrated with respect to the prioritized service quality dimensions and their affections on increasing/decreasing service quality gaps. In the following, after a brief review of the service quality concept, the model of service quality gaps and the SERVQUAL methodology is demonstrated and an example is presented to pinpoint the application of the SERVQUAL approach. Then, after a discussion, major conclusions are derived.

The point (the number and dimensions of service quality vary depending on the context and culture involved) is of particular concern when evaluating service quality in developing countries. For example, [Imrie et al. (2002)] highlight interpersonal relations as a dimension important to Taiwanese customers not adequately addressed by SERVQUAL. [Sureshchandar et al. (2003)] emphasis the significance of technological and human factors with bank customers in India. Other studies such as [Angur et al. (1999) and Wang et al. (2003)] have also found the SERVQUAL dimensions to be inadequate in that they do not fully describe the service criteria important to customers of emerging markets.