- Full Text
- Scholarly Journal
Measuring service quality for strategic planning and analysis in service firms
Full text preview
INTRODUCTION The economic base of the United States is increasingly service oriented. In fact, 70% of the United States economy is involved in services, not including the three-fourths of manufacturing activities that represent support services (Collier, 1992). Several authors (e.g. Quinn, 1992a, 1992b; Drucker, 1992; Quinn, Doorley, & Paquette, 1990) have suggested that as U.S. society becomes more information driven and service based, corporations will have to revise their traditional approaches to strategic management. For example, Quinn states that "....a strategy built around core intellectual or service competencies provides both a rigorously maintainable strategic focus and long term flexibility" (Quinn, 1992b:50). Paralleling the recognition of the importance of service activities is a growing awareness that strategic management must be approached from a framework of quality assessment and enhancement (Quinn, 1992a; Dobyns & Crawford-Mason, 1991; Roth, 1992). Thers fore, it is apparent that quality issues are becoming critical aspects for the strategic management of service firms. In spite of this recognition, however, very little research in the strategic management field to date has been directed toward the issue of service quality assessment. The current study overcomes this gap in the literature by assessing the state of the art in service quality assessment in social science research. The discussion begins with a review of the alternative techniques that have emerged for assessing the quality of services provided by firms. Of particular interest will be a discussion of the SERVQUAL scale (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry, 1988), a proposed measurement instrument for service quality measurement that purports reliability and generalizability across unique service settings, as some strategy scholars (e.g. Quinn 1992a, Stank 1993) have recently embraced this scale. Second, the emerging literature concerning the validity and utility of the SERVQUAL scale for measuring service quality is presented. This emerging literature calls into question the...