Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.3 Service Quality
2.3.1 The Definition of Service Quality
Customer’s expectation has to be hit by past experience, people’s recommendation and proper advertisement. The business can provide the best of service quality better than its competitor to get the customer’s recognition. The customer would make a future purchase if
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the service is much better than what it is expected. This study summarized the scholars’
definitions about service quality in Table 2-8.
Table 2-8: The Definitions of Service Quality
Scholar Definition
Sasser, Olsen, and Wyckoff (1978)
Service quality with the final results of the assessment, but also includes provision of services and characteristics of services.
Lewis, and Booms (1983) Service quality is a measure of the degree to which the service delivered matches customer expectations.
Gronross(1984, 1990)
Quality of service relies on 3 factors:
(1) Functional Quality (2) Technology Quality (3) Corporate Image
Zimmerman (1985)
Conditions of quality for service industries include:
(1) Fitness for use,
(2) The ability to replicate (3) Timeliness,
(4) End-user satisfaction
(5) Adherence to pre-established specifications.
Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry ( 1985 ,1988)
Service quality is a function of the differences between expectation and performance along the quality dimensions.
Juran ( 1986 )
Service quality can meet the customer request.
(1) Hardware Quality (2) Software Quality (3) Time Promptness (4) Internal Quality (5) Psychological Quality
Bitner(1990) Service quality is consumer the overall attitude of willingness to serve after servicing.
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Anderson, Fornall, and Lehmann ( 1994 )
Service quality is a global evaluation of a firm’s service delivery system.
Source: This Study
2.3.2 The Measure of Service Quality Model
There are many researchers who have defined service quality in different ways.
Parasuraman et al., (1985) defined service quality as ‘a function of the differences between expectation and performance along the quality dimensions’. In order to show the requirements for delivering high quality service, Parasuraman et al., (1985) developed a conceptual model of service quality. The five gaps described below, shown in Fgure2-7 might result in poor quality.
Gap 1: Gap which difference between Customer expectations and management perceptions.
Gap 2: Gap which difference between management perceptions of customer expectations and service quality specifications.
Gap 3: Difference between service quality specifications and the service actually delivered.
Gap 4: Difference between service delivery and what is communicated about the service to consumers.
Gap 5: Gap which difference between consumer expectations and perceptions.
Word of
Figure 2-7: Service Quality Model Source: Parasuraman et al., 1985
The SERVQUAL (Service Quality) by Parasuraman et al. (1985), was developed and evolved into a better measurement instrument with the original 22-item and was well represented one of the most widely used operations in the field of service quality.
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With the 10 originally distinguished dimensions, in 1988, they recast the analysis and
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reduced the number of components to five shown as Table 2-9.
Table 2-9: Dimensions of SERVQUAL
Original Ten Dimensions Reduced Five dimensions
Reliability Reliability
Understanding/Knowing the customer Empathy
Source: Parasuraman et al., 1988
Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry have refined five service quality measurement proposed and developed SERVQUAL Scale by large size empiric to revise the original SERVQUAL Scale and had better reliability and validity in 1991. We list the dimensions comparison in Table 2-10.
Table 2-10: The Revised SERVQUAL Scale
Service quality measurement aspects Measured items
1. Tangible:
Physical facilities, equipment and appearance of personnel.
1. This store has modernized equipment.
2. The exterior of this store is appealing.
3. The employees of this store dress neatly and clean look.
4. The facilities of this store matches the service provided.
2. Reliability:
Ability to perform the promised service dependably and accurately.
5. The store can meet its promises.
6. This store cordially offers to help and solve problems.
7. The service of this store is reliable.
8. This store provides appropriate service during the promised time frame.
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9. The transaction records of this store are accurate.
3. Responsiveness:
Willingness to help customers and provide prompt service.
10. This store notifies the customer while providing service.
11. The employees of this store offer customers appropriate service.
12. The employees of this store are always willing to assist customers.
13. The employees would not be able to offer the appropriate service to customers if they are too busy.
4. Assurance:
Knowledge and courtesy of employees and their ability to inspire trust and confidence.
14. Customers can trust the employees of this store.
15. Customers feel security while contacting the employees of this store.
16. The employees of this store are polite.
17. This store provides proper assistance to its employees for better performance.
5. Empathy:
Caring, individualized attention the firm provides its customers.
18. This store offers personalized service to customers.
19. The employees of this store offer individual care to customers.
20. The employees of this store understand the needs of customers.
21. This store regards the maximum benefit of customers.
22. The operation hours of this store provides convenience to customers.
Source: Parasuraman et al., 1991
Despite criticisms of the general applicability of the perceived service quality model (SERVQUAL instrument) by Cronin and Taylor (1994), this instrument is a concise multiple-item scale with good reliability (Lewis and Mitchell, 1990) and has been widely accepted as a valid instrument (Fisk et al., 1993; Carman, 1990) in the measurement of service quality. At the same time, most literatures of the discussion and appliance of service quality mainly base on SERVQUAL Scale. Thus, we will design the questionnaire base on the
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refinement of the SERVQUAL Scale in 1991.
2.3.3 Customer Satisfaction
The satisfaction is an attitude or evaluation that is formed by the customer comparing their pre-purchase expectations of what that would receive from the product to their subjective perceptions of the performance they actually did receive. This study as well summarized the scholars’ definitions about customer satisfaction in Table 2-11.
Table 2-11: The Definitions of Customer Satisfaction
Scholar Definition Howard & Sheth
( 1969 )
The buyer’s state of being adequately or inadequately rewarded for the sacrifices he has undergone.
Solomon (1991) Satisfaction is an overall attitude for purchase.
Oliver(1993)
Cumulative customer Satisfaction can be distinguished from transaction-specific customer satisfaction, which is an immediate post-purchase evaluative judgment or an affective reaction to the most recent transactional experience with the firm.
Anderson, Fornall, and
Lehmann ( 1994 )
Overall customer Satisfaction (or cumulative customer satisfaction) is an overall evaluation based on the total purchase and consumption experience with a good or service over time.
Kotler ( 2003 )
Satisfaction is a person’s feeling of pleasure or disappointment resulting from comparing a product’s perceived performance in relation to his or her expectations.
Source: This Study
2.4 Quality Function Deployment
2.4.1 The Introduction of Quality Function Deployment (QFD)
Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a design methodology which can help planners to focus on characteristics of a new or existing product, or service from the viewpoints of market segments. It was originated in the late 1960s to early 1970s, in Japan, by Professor
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Yoji Akao (Akao, 1972), and it is a formal technique commonly used in the early phase of the design process. QFD was also a part of the implementation of the total quality management (TQM) system at the Mitsubishi Shipyard in Japan (Akao, 1990). It was first applied at Mithubishi Kobe Shipyards in 1972 to assure customer satisfaction and has been used as a customer-oriented approach to facilitate product design.
QFD is an integrated set of tools for recording user requirements, engineering characteristics that satisfy these user requirements, and any trade-offs that might be necessary between the engineering characteristics. QFD can help companies make the key trade-offs between what the customer wants and what the company can afford to build. By concentrating efforts on what will satisfy the customers and the company most, less time will be spent on redesign and modification of the product and process.
QFD is a customer-oriented, products and/or services design methodology (Akao, 1990;
Clausing, 1994; Cohen, 1995) that links customer needs to technical characteristics of the product in order to ensure market success once the product is released. Traditionally, QFD uses data about importance and customer’s satisfaction with different requirements to identify the attributes that should be incorporated or improved in a product. QFD is a method to transform user demands into design quality, to deploy the functions forming quality, and to deploy methods for achieving the design quality into subsystems and component parts, and ultimately to specific elements of the manufacturing process.
2.4.2 The Process of QFD
Use QFD to improve a company's understanding of its customers' desires and needs, and determine how an existing product or service can be improved upon. QFD will assist in the organization and prioritization of information to satisfy the stated objective. This stage is referred to as the engineering characteristics or measurable. The QFD process involves four phases (see Figure2-8):
1. The product planning matrix (the House of Quality).
2. The design deployment matrix (part deployment).
3. The manufacturing planning matrix (process planning).
4. The production planning matrix (production operations planning).
According to the fourth phase is, instead of a matrix, a table containing a checklist of topics or issues that should be considered in the production planning steps. A chart (matrix) represents each phase of the QFD process. The complete QFD process requires at least four houses to be built that extend throughout the entire system's development life-cycle, with each house representing a QFD phase. It also makes the design process more effective according to deployment step by step.
Customer Attributes
Figure 2-8: The Four Phases of QFD Source: Hauser and Clausing, (1988)
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In the first phase, the most important engineering characteristics, that satisfy most of the customers' demands defined by the scoring at the bottom of the house, go on to form the input to the subsequent stage in the QFD process.
(1) The Planning Matrix or House of Quality (HOQ), it sets forth product design specifications or engineering characteristics, in terms of their relative importance and target values to be achieved in design and manufacturing.
(2) The Product Deployment Matrix in which design specs from the planning matrix are stepped down to the subsystem and component level. Critical relationships between component and product characteristics are flagged.
(3) The Component Development Matrix which illuminates the exact parameters of component design.
(4) The Operator Instruction Sheet, the final key document, defines operational requirements, the process plan checkpoints and the quality control plan chart.
By completing the fourth phase, production planning can be linked to the starting point:
the voice of the customer. Structured with interrelated matrices (as shown in Figure 2-9), QFD is an integrative scheme for transforming the market requirements into technical requirements and specifications at all project levels.
2.4.3 The QFD Method
The QFD method consists of the construction of one or more matrices. QFD employs several matrices to clearly establish relationships between company functions and customer satisfaction. Among these interrelated phases (as shown in Figure 2-10), the HOQ is the most commonly used table and its aim is to reflect customer wants. Its concept and mechanism is to translate Customer Requirements directly into a product’s technical characteristics through the various stages of product planning, engineering, and manufacturing.
Because quality table has a “roof” on the top, it is called a “quality house” which is also known as “the House of Quality” (see Figure 2-9). HOQ is the primary tool of QFD which calculates the weights and relationships automatically and could easily and rapidly reflect the priorities among the customers and design requirements (Akao, 1990). One form of QFD is a four-phase model, which includes the house of quality (HOQ), parts deployment, process planning and production planning (Hauser and Clausing, 1988). These four linked house implicitly convey the voice of customer through manufacturing. It uses a matrix to present what the customers’ requires against how those requirements would be met.
Correlation Matrix
Technical Requirement (How)
Relationship Matrix
Target Values Technical Assessment
Weight
Customer Assessment Importance
Customer attributes (What)
Figure 2-9: House of Quality Source: Griffin and Hauser, (1992) The columns of HOQ are set referring to following usage:
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Step 1: Customer Requirements - "Voice of the Customer"The first step in a QFD project is to determine what market segments will be
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analyzed during the process and to identify who the customers are. The team then gathers information from customers on the requirements they have for the product or service. In order to organize and evaluate this data, the team uses simple quality tools like Affinity Diagrams or Tree Diagrams.
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Step 2: Regulatory RequirementsNot all product or service requirements are known to the customer, so the team must document requirements that are dictated by management or regulatory standards that the product must adhere to.
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Step 3: Customer Importance RatingsOn a scale from 1 - 5, customers then rate the importance of each requirement. This number will be used later in the relationship matrix.
Relationship matrix collects all relationships among design and customers’
requirements.
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Step 4: Customer Rating of the CompetitionUnderstanding how customers rate the competition can be a tremendous competitive advantage. In this step of the QFD process, it is also a good idea to ask customers how your product or service rates in relation to the competition. There is remodeling that can take place in this part of the House of Quality. Additional rooms that identify sales opportunities, goals for continuous improvement, customer complaints, etc., can be added.
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Step 5: Technical Descriptors - "Voice of the Engineer"The technical descriptors are attributes about the product or service that can be measured and benchmarked against the competition. Technical descriptors may exist that your organization is already using to determine product specification, however new measurements can be created to ensure that your product is meeting customer needs.
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Step 6: Direction of ImprovementAs the team defines the technical descriptors, a determination must be made as to the direction of movement for each descriptor.
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Step 7: Relationship MatrixThe relationship matrix is where the team determines the relationship between customer needs and the company's ability to meet those needs. The team asks the question, "What is the strength of the relationship between the technical descriptors and the customers’ needs?" Relationships can either be weak, moderate, or strong or carry a numeric value of 1, 3 or 9.
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Step 8: Organizational DifficultyRate the design attributes in terms of organizational difficulty. It is very possible that some attributes are in direct conflict. Increasing the number of sizes may be in conflict with the company’s stock holding policies, for example.
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Step 9: Technical Analysis of Competitor ProductsTo better understand the competition, engineering then conducts a comparison of competitor technical descriptors. This process involves reverse engineering competitor products to determine specific values for competitor technical descriptors.
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Step 10: Target Values for Technical DescriptorsAt this stage in the process, the QFD team begins to establish target values for each technical descriptor. Target values represent "how much" for the technical descriptors, and can then act as a base-line to compare against.
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Step 11: Correlation MatrixThis room in the matrix is where the term House of Quality comes from because it makes the matrix look like a house with a roof. The correlation matrix is probably the least used room in the House of Quality; however, this room is a big help to the
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design engineers in the next phase of a comprehensive QFD project. Team members must examine how each of the technical descriptors impacts each other. The team should document strong negative relationships between technical descriptors and work to eliminate physical contradictions.
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Step 12: Absolute ImportanceFinally, the team calculates the absolute importance for each technical descriptor.
This numerical calculation is the product of the cell value and the customer importance rating. Numbers are then added up in their respective columns to determine the importance for each technical descriptor.
A house of quality (HOQ) involves the collection and analysis of the “voice of the customer” which includes the customer needs for a product, customers’ perceptions on the relative importance of these needs and the relative performance of the producing company and its main competitors on the needs. With such a large amount of information to be collected and processed, building an HOQ may be too complex to be complete and comparable. Thus systematization of the HOQ process is a necessity.
Chapter 3 Research Methodology
This chapter provides the conceptual framework based on the research motives and objectives described above. The main purpose of the study was to gain a better understanding of the relationship between service quality and customer satisfaction. Moreover, the operational definition of variables and measurement, data collection, and analysis method is described in turn.
3.1 Research Structure
Based on the research motives, research objectives, and the literature reviews, the author illustrates the structure, as in Figure 3-1.
Customer Attributes (Voice to Customer)
Technical Requirement (Voice to Engineer)
Relationship Requirement
Quality Attribute Ranking QFD
Importance Performance
Analysis
Technical Assessment
Improvement Strategy
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Figure 3-1: Research Structure Source: This Study
3.2 Operational Definition of Variables and Measurement
Product Service System (PSS)
For the measurement of product service system, the construct here was decomposed into three attributes: product orientated, use orientated and result orientated, for the study survey (Tukker, 2004). The author reviewed these three attributes to fit the PZB service quality and established a scale of 34 attributes to measure the concept of service quality via the research questionnaire.
Service Quality (SQ)
Service quality is a widely studied and debated construct. Parasuraman, Zeithmal, and Berry (1985) defined the quality that a consumer perceives in a service is a function of the magnitude and direction of the gap between expected and perceived service (Parasuraman et al., 1985). The author designed the questionnaire based on the refinement and reassessment of the SERVQUAL Scale in 1991. There are 22 attributes used to evaluate service quality.
Customer importance (CI)
Customer Importance (CI) represents the degree of importance placed by the customer on each customer quality demand attributes. The data are obtained from the customer questionnaire of each user. The Likert five-point scale is used for scoring, with 1 representing extremely unimportant and five representing extremely important.
Customer Satisfaction (CS)
The study defines customer satisfaction as the degree of overall satisfaction of C-bike user’s experience. The data for each type of C-bike are obtained from customer questionnaires.
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A Likert five-point scale is used for scoring, where highly satisfied is scored 5 and highly unsatisfied is scored 1.
3.3 Sampling and Data Collection
On the basis of items used in the literature and the definitions established in our research, the author generated a pool of sample measures. All items were measured on a 5-point Likert-type scale, with anchors of 1 = strongly disagree and 5 = strongly agree. The pretest used a judgment sample of 30 actual users, and was subsequently revised to improve readability and understanding.
The primary criterion for selecting subjects was experience in using the bicycle sharing system. This research uses convenient sampling to collect data. The data collection covers the period during 22nd of Jan., 2010 to the 30th of Apr., 2010. The participants in this research were selected from the population at several rental stations: Central Park, Sanduo Shopping District, Film Archive, Singuang Zhengkong, Dream Mall, Love Pier, etc. A total of 320 questionnaires were issued, with 306 recovered, so the recovery rate was 95.6%. The valid samples were 297.
Each subject was asked to complete the self-administered questionnaire (see Appendix A). Instructions emphasized that “there are no right or wrong answers; only your personal opinions matter” to minimize possible response bias.
Table 3-1: Sampling
Subjects Subjects with experience in using public bikes
Locations Central Park, Sanduo Shopping District, Film Archive, Singuang Zhengkong, Dream Mall, Love Pier, etc.
Time The period from the 22nd of Jan., 2010 to the 30th of Apr., 2010
Issued Samples 320
Samples Collection 306
Valid Samples 297
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Response Rate 95.6%
Source: This Study
3.4 Questionnaire Design
According to the literature review, experts, customers and service providers of the in-depth interviews, the bike sharing system’s service quality characteristics of the questionnaire are divided into: equipment quality, use quality, and the quality of service personnel, for a total of three major categories. And then, various categories of bike sharing systems were divided into 34 attributes of service quality dimensions, as questionnaire attribute (see Table 3-2).
Table 3-2: Survey Attributes
Dimensions Attributes Reference
1. I can rent or return the bike (C-bike) to the rental station any time.
2. The bike sharing system clearly explains how to rent
2. The bike sharing system clearly explains how to rent