Service quality involves a comparison of expectations with performance.
According to Lewis and Booms (1983) service quality is a measure of how well a delivered service matches the customers expectations.

Generally the customer is requesting a service at the service interface where the service encounter is being realized, then the service is being provided by the provider and in the same time delivered to or consumed by the customer.

The main reason to focus on quality is to meet customer needs while remaining economically competitive in the same time. This means satisfying customer needs is very important for the enterprises to survive. The outcome of using quality practices is:

• Understanding and improving of operational processes
• Identifying problems quickly and systematically
• Establishing valid and reliable service performance measures
• Measuring customer satisfaction and other performance outcomes

Definition

Service quality is a business administration's term and describes the degree of achievement of an ordered service

Customer service

Customer service is the provision of service to customers before, during and after a purchase.According to Turban et al. , “Customer service is a series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction – that is, the feeling that a product or service has met the customer...

.
In this connection, objective

Objectivity (philosophy)

Objectivity is a central philosophical concept which has been variously defined by sources. A proposition is generally considered to be objectively true when its truth conditions are met and are "mind-independent"—that is, not met by the judgment of a conscious entity or subject.- Objectivism...

 and subjective

Subjectivity

Subjectivity refers to the subject and his or her perspective, feelings, beliefs, and desires. In philosophy, the term is usually contrasted with objectivity.-Qualia:...

 service quality can be distinguished.

• Objective service quality is the concrete measurable conformity of a working result with the previous defined benefit; since the measurability is remarkable dependent on the definition's accuracy, a measurable quality criterion easily can turn out as a subjective one.

• Subjective service quality is the customers perceived conformity of the working result with the expected benefit; this perception is overlayed with the customers original imagination of the service and the service providers talent to present his performance as a good one.

Moreover, a defined result can turn out as unreachable. Then the best possible achievable result would be the objective ideal result, but subjective still be an unsatisfactory result of a service.

Service quality can be related to service potential, service process or service result.

In this way for example, potential quality can be understood as the co-workers qualification, process quality as the speed of the generated service and result quality as how much the performance matched the customers wishes.

Criteria of service quality

Word-of-mouth, personal needs and past experience create an expected service (expectation of the service). The perceived service will be compared with the expected service by the customer. And leads to the perceived service quality as a result. Between the expected and the perceived service can appear a gap if the perceived service does not match with the expected service.
Factors which influence the appearing of the gap were found by Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry in 1985.

Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry (1985) identified ten determinants of service quality that may relate to any service:

• Competence
  Competence (human resources)
  Competence is the ability of an individual to perform a job properly. A competency is a set of defined behaviors that provide a structured guide enabling the identification, evaluation and development of the behaviors in individual employees. As defined, the term "competence" first appeared in...
  
  (Possession of the required skills and knowledge to perform the service: knowledge and skill of the contact personnel, knowledge and skill of the operational support personnel, research capability of the organization)
• Courtesy (Politeness, respect, consideration and friendliness of the contact personnel: consideration for the customer's property, clean and neat appearance of public contact personnel)
• Credibility (Trustworthiness, believability and honesty. It involves having the customer's best interest at heart: company name, company reputation, personal characteristics of the contact personnel)
• Security (Freedom from danger, risk or doubt: physical safety, financial security, confidentiality)
• Access (Approachability and ease of contact: Service is easily accessible, waiting time to receive service is not extensive, convenient hours of operation, convenient location of service facility)
• Communication
  Communication
  Communication is the activity of conveying meaningful information. Communication requires a sender, a message, and an intended recipient, although the receiver need not be present or aware of the sender's intent to communicate at the time of communication; thus communication can occur across vast...
  
  (Informing the customers in a language they can understand and listening to them. It may mean that the company has to adjust its language for different consumers: explaining the service itself, explaining how much the service will cost, explaining the trade-offs between service and cost, assuring the consumer that the problem will be handled)
• Understanding
  Understanding
  Understanding is a psychological process related to an abstract or physical object, such as a person, situation, or message whereby one is able to think about it and use concepts to deal adequately with that object....
  
  / knowing the customer (Making the effort to understand the customer's needs: understanding customer's specific needs, providing individualized attention, recognizing the customer)
• Tangibles (Physical evidence of the service: appearance of physical facilities, tools and equipments used to provide the service, appearance of personnel and communication materials, other customers in the service facility)
• Reliability (The ability to perform the promised service dependably and accurately: service is performed right at the first time, the company keeps its promises in accuracy in billing, in keeping records correctly and in performing the services at the designated time)
• Responsiveness (The willingness and/ or readiness of employees to help customers and to provide prompt service, timeliness of service: mailing a transaction slip immediately, setting up appointments quickly)

Later they were reduced to five by Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry (1988):

• Tangibles (Physical evidence of the service: appearance of physical facilities, tools and equipments used to provide the service, appearance of personnel and communication materials)
• Reliability (The ability to perform the promised service dependably and accurately: consistency of performance and dependability, service is performed right at the first time, the company keeps its promises in accuracy in billing and keeping records correctly, performing the services at the designated time)
• Responsiveness (The willingness and/ or readiness of employees to help customers and to provide prompt service, timeliness of service: mailing a transaction slip immediately, setting up appointments quickly)
• Assurance
  Service assurance
  Service assurance, in telecommunications, is the application of policies and processes by a Communications Service Provider to ensure that services offered over networks meet a pre-defined service quality level for an optimal subscriber experience....
  
  (The knowledge and courtesy of employees and their ability to convey trust and confidence: competence (possession of the required skills and knowledge to perform the service), courtesy (consideration for the customer's property, clean and neat appearance of public contact personnel), trustworthiness, security (safety and confidentiality))
• Empathy (The provision of caring, individualized attention to customers: informing the customers in a language they can understand, Understanding customer's specific needs, Providing individualized attention)

A sixth criterion was proposed by Grönroos in 1988: recovery.
It has the same effect as the junk yard strategy, which is used to support the zero defects strategy

Zero Defects

"Zero Defects" is Step 7 of "Philip Crosby's 14 Step Quality Improvement Process" . Although applicable to any type of enterprise, it has been primarily adopted within industry supply chains wherever large volumes of components are being purchased .Zero Defects was a quality control program...

.
The customer needs to stay happy. Since there are many bad services being delivered to the customer and according to latest researches 12 good service encounters are needed to make up a bad one, the criterion recovery can play an important role.

Models of service quality

There are two main models:

• Service Quality Model of Grönroos Grönroos says that the expectations of the customer depend on the 5 determinants market communication, image, word of mouth, customer needs and customer learning. Experiences depends on the techniqal quality (what/ outcome) and the functional quality (how/process), which are filtered through the image (who). Both expectations and experiences can create a perception gap.
• GAP Model of Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry The model says that the expected service is influenced by the word-of-mouth, the personal needs, past experience and also by the external communication to customers. A perception gap can appear between the expected service and the perceived service. This gap is called the GAP 5 (also called the service quality gap), it occurs if the customer is not satisfied and depends on the other 4 gaps.

The perceived quality depends on the external communication to customers and the service delivery. The GAP 4 (also called the communication gap) is appearing between the external communication to customers and the service delivery. It appears when promises do not match the delivery.

The service delivery depends on the service quality specifications. If they are not match each other the GAP 3 (also called the service performance gap) appears.

The service quality specifications depends on the management perceptions of customer expectations, where the management perceptions of customer expectations influence the external communication to customers. The GAP 2 (also called the standards gap) occurs between the management perceptions of customer expectations and the service quality specifications if the wrong quality standards were consulted.

The biggest gap, the GAP 1 (also called the marketing information gap) occurs between the management perceptions of customer expectations
and the expected service. It appears because the service provider does not know what the customer expect.

Key factors contributing to the gaps

GAP 1: Not knowing what customers expect:

• Lack of marketing research orientation
• Inadequate upward communication
• Too many levels of management

GAP 2: The wrong service quality standards:

• Inadequate management commitment to service quality
• Perception of infeasibility
• Inadequate task standardization
• Absence of goal setting

GAP 3: Service performance gap:

• Employee role ambiguity
• Employee role conflict
• Poor Employee job fit
• Poor Technology job fit
• Inappropriate evaluation and reward systems
• Lack of empowered service employees
• Lack of teamwork

GAP 4: When promises do not match delivery:

• Inadequate horizontal communication
• Tendency to overpromise

GAP 5: customer satisfaction:

• depends on gap 1-4
• The greater the gap the lower the customer satisfaction, because expectation and perception do not match.

Quality measurement

Quality measurement is separated in subjective and objective processes, at which mostly the customers satisfaction is being measured. Measuring the customers satisfaction is an indirect way to measure quality.

Objective processes are being subdivided into primary and secondary processes:

• During primary processes, test buyings from silent shoppers are being made or normal customers are being watched.
• During secondary processes quantifiable enterprise numbers like amount of complaints or the amount of given back goods are being analyzed, and with this information conclusions to quality can be drawn.

Subjective processes are being subdivided into characteristic orientated, incident orientated and problem orientated processes.

• To the characteristic focused processes counts the SERVQUAL
  SERVQUAL
  SERVQUAL or RATER is a service quality framework. SERVQUAL was developed in the mid eighties by Zeithaml, Parasuraman & Berry.-Concept:SERVQUAL was originally measured on 10 aspects of service quality: reliability, responsiveness, competence, access, courtesy, communication, credibility, security,...
  
   method
• To the incident focused processes counts the Critical Incident Theory
  Critical Incident Technique
  The Critical Incident Technique is a set of procedures used for collecting direct observations of human behavior that have critical significance and meet methodically defined criteria. These observations are then kept track of as incidents, which are then used to solve practical problems and...
  
  
• To the problem focused processes counts the Frequenz Relevanz Analyse (German)

The most important and most used process to measure service quality is the SERVQUAL

SERVQUAL

SERVQUAL or RATER is a service quality framework. SERVQUAL was developed in the mid eighties by Zeithaml, Parasuraman & Berry.-Concept:SERVQUAL was originally measured on 10 aspects of service quality: reliability, responsiveness, competence, access, courtesy, communication, credibility, security,...

 method.

Approaches to improve service quality

Generally the service design or the service delivery can be improved to achieve a high quality service.

The service design consists in:

• Service product design
• Service facility design
• Service process designated

The service delivery consists in:

• Service delivery process
• Service encounter environment
• Customer-Provider interaction

And the following approaches can be used for the improvement:

• Quality function deployment
  Quality function deployment
  Quality function deployment 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.”, as...
  
   (QFD)
• Failsafing
  Fail-safe
  A fail-safe or fail-secure device is one that, in the event of failure, responds in a way that will cause no harm, or at least a minimum of harm, to other devices or danger to personnel....
  
  
• Moving the line of visibility and line of accessibility
• Blueprinting

Approaches to improve conformance quality

In order to ensure and increase the conformance quality of services, i.e. the service delivery happens as designed, various methods are available. Some of these are listed below:

• Guaranteeing
  Surety
  A surety or guarantee, in finance, is a promise by one party to assume responsibility for the debt obligation of a borrower if that borrower defaults...
  
  
• Mystery Shopping
  Mystery shopping
  Mystery shopping or a mystery consumer is a tool used externally by market research companies or watchdog organizations or internally by companies themselves to measure quality of service or compliance to regulation, or to gather specific information about products and services...
  
  
• Recovering
• Setting standards and measuring
• Statistical process control
  Statistical process control
  Statistical process control is the application of statistical methods to the monitoring and control of a process to ensure that it operates at its full potential to produce conforming product. Under SPC, a process behaves predictably to produce as much conforming product as possible with the least...
  
  
• Customer involvement
  Customer involvement management
  Customer Involvement Management, CIM, is an approach that takes the customer orientation one step further than Customer Relationship Management. CIM is about identifying and developing possibilities to involve customers in the business and product development process, such as design, marketing,...
  
  

Realization

So, service quality consists in several factors. Enterprises can orientate a determined contingent of their organization to service, in the organizational department. Examples are establishing protest departments or Hotlines.
Furthermore, enterprises can adapt their terms and conditions regarding to service. Goodwill regulations or widened replacement regulations.

The function of service quality is competitiveness including customer satisfaction (maintain a customer base).

It is not necessary that a firm applies all of the 5 main quality criteria. Instead the company can emphasize on the ones which are important for its strategy.

See also

• ISO 9001
• Quality Management
  Quality management
  The term Quality management has a specific meaning within many business sectors. This specific definition, which does not aim to assure 'good quality' by the more general definition , can be considered to have four main components: quality planning, quality control, quality assurance and quality...
  
  
• Process Quality
• Customer focus
• Service Marketing
• Mystery Shopping
  Mystery shopping
  Mystery shopping or a mystery consumer is a tool used externally by market research companies or watchdog organizations or internally by companies themselves to measure quality of service or compliance to regulation, or to gather specific information about products and services...
  
  
• Work Quality