SERVQUAL Model - Consumption of Service Products

In later publications PZB, having analysed their data using factor analysis, reduced the original ten dimensions to the following five: tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy and created a 22-item questionnaire measuring instrument they named SERVQUAL which measures these five dimensions in any service organisation.

One of the major criticisms of their work relates to their claim to have found the five generic underlying dimensions of service quality.

Despite being broad in application, there is wide spread dissention of this point. There are a number of other limitations (Cronin and Taylor, 1994, Rust and Oliver, 1994): 

• The comparison of expectations and perceptions would require expectations to be stated prior to the service encounter rather than as a post encounter activity
• The scale closes the gap to zero but does not take into account the situation when the perception of service exceeds expectations and would require an extension of the scale which would provide a non zero, positive measurement
• The servperf measuring instrument which measures only performance is thought to provide greater insights into service quality.
• The approach is not generic and becomes less applicable when it is applied out-with the range of service encounters described by the original research (retail banking, credit cards etc)
• Cronin and taylor (1994) argue that service quality should be measured as an attitude.
• Johnston (1997) suggests that customer evaluation may be a superior measurement to customer expectation.

Obviously the SERVQUAL performance based approach has limitations, nevertheless, as PZB defend, it does provide the operations manager with a valuable diagnostic tool which can be used to help direct the use and application or resources to enhance or create customer value. The approach may be tailored to particular services by rewording or adding or dropping factors/dimensions.