Column 10 · Service, Value, and Experience · Era 3, Competitive Advantage (1980s)
Service Quality
Outputs: performance · Landmark · Cluster IV, Customer and Brand Assets
Description
SERVQUAL operationalized service quality as the gap between customer expectations and perceptions across five dimensions (tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy) and provided a multi-item scale for measuring it.
Managerial Implications
Customers judge service on reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy, and tangibles, with reliability first. Measure each dimension and locate the gaps: between what customers expect and what managers think they expect, between standards and delivery, and between delivery and what is promised. Most service failures are gap failures in the organization, not frontline failures, so fix the system before retraining the staff.