Service Quality: A Tutorial, Essay Example

The service quality survey I chose to assess is available at

http://home.ubalt.edu/ntsbmilb/survey/customer.HTM. This particular survey was designed to assess a variety of services offered in addition to the quality of services (The Customer Quality Service Survey, n.d.). This survey is particularly effective because it requests the consumer to rate several of the company’s performance objectives on a scale of one to five and a total of 24 questions are asked. This is ideal primarily because customers are more likely to complete surveys that are easy to fill out and ask minimal questions. Since it is expected that the survey will only take approximately five minutes to complete, customers that are requested to complete it are more likely to agree.

An additional benefit of this particular survey is that is asks a comprehensive set of questions that cover both the accuracy of company performance and their ability to address customer concerns in addition to the quality of services provided. Therefore, it is expected that the information generated by this survey will benefit the company. In order to ensure that this survey is effective in doing so, it is essential that it is distributed to an adequate number of customers in order to obtain results with significant statistical power. Once this information is received and analyzed, it can be interpreted to drive company practices.

It is important for the company to determine the likelihood that customers will fill it out before issuing the survey. If there is a low level of return, then the company should reduce the number of questions asked from 15 to 20 and there should be three options on a scale of one to three rather than one to five. This will allow the survey to be dichotomized as “good” and “bad” or no opinion. However, even after this optimization, it may be necessary for the company to retrieve additional information from their customers. Therefore, additional customer and non-customer approaches in retrieving this information should be utilized.

An additional customer approach in retrieving this information should be to issue a random service quality survey to frequent customers and to customers that are less frequent in order to determine how to encourage more repeat business. While this is similar to the approach used in the initial survey, acquiring this information using a different set of customers would be useful because it can help the company understand what types of service quality is necessary for two different types of customers.

An additional non-customer approach that could be used includes comparing company data such as customer visits over time and profit compared to industry standards. This will allow the company to determine whether they are competitive compared to the rest of the industry and to gain a more comprehensive understanding of what the competition has done to corner the customers in the market. Ultimately, this data will help the company create information systems that will be useful in the future, which can be used to aid in recovery if they find that they are too far behind their competitors. It is important for these companies to continue gathering information for this purpose on a constant basis. This competition will ultimately drive the successes of the industry and it is expected that customer service will improve across the board and the industry will benefit as a consequence.

References

ASQ. (n.d.). Airport Specific Research. Retrieved from  http://www.airportservicequality.aero/content/survey/airport.html

Harvey, J. (1998). Service quality: a tutorial. Journal of Operations Management, 16, 583–597.