Journal of Management Research

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Customer Expectations and Service Quality Dimensions Consistency


Affiliations
1 Bhagini Nivedita College University of Delhi, Delhi
2 Faculty of Management Studies University of Delhi, Delhi
     

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Service marketers bemoan what they perceive as an unprecedented increase of customer expectations in many service industries. Customer expectations are on rise with each competitive advance. While at most everybody has an intuitive sense of what expectations are, service marketers need a far more thorough and clear understanding of expectations in order to comprehend the concept of service quality and to measure and manage it. A literature review suggests that the measurement of service quality is full of controversy associated with many issues, of which an important few are : the type of expectations customers hold in the evaluation, important manageable service quality dimensions / attributes that define it in its full framework and dimensional consistency across the service categories. The paper examines these aspects in select services. The results suggest that (1) Customer 'would' and 'should' expectations differ significantly at most of the times, (2) 'would' expectations are comparatively closer to the service performance, (3) all the suggested dimensions of service quality are important, and (4) service quality may not always be the same five-factor structure as proposed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry from time to time.

Keywords

Service Quality, should Expectation, would Expectation, Quality Dimensions
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  • Customer Expectations and Service Quality Dimensions Consistency

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Authors

Sheetal B. Sachdev
Bhagini Nivedita College University of Delhi, Delhi
Harsh V. Verma
Faculty of Management Studies University of Delhi, Delhi

Abstract


Service marketers bemoan what they perceive as an unprecedented increase of customer expectations in many service industries. Customer expectations are on rise with each competitive advance. While at most everybody has an intuitive sense of what expectations are, service marketers need a far more thorough and clear understanding of expectations in order to comprehend the concept of service quality and to measure and manage it. A literature review suggests that the measurement of service quality is full of controversy associated with many issues, of which an important few are : the type of expectations customers hold in the evaluation, important manageable service quality dimensions / attributes that define it in its full framework and dimensional consistency across the service categories. The paper examines these aspects in select services. The results suggest that (1) Customer 'would' and 'should' expectations differ significantly at most of the times, (2) 'would' expectations are comparatively closer to the service performance, (3) all the suggested dimensions of service quality are important, and (4) service quality may not always be the same five-factor structure as proposed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry from time to time.

Keywords


Service Quality, should Expectation, would Expectation, Quality Dimensions

References