Prioritization of Service Quality Parameters Based on Ordinal Responses

Abstract The importance attributed to service sector industries has become more pronounced in the post-globalization era and the trend continues unabated even today. In such industries, direct assessment of the service quality is often not possible and the measurement has to be made in terms of suitable surrogates through various parameters related to delivery, support, cost, billing, access, speed, response to queries, complaint redressal and so on. The SERVQUAL models and their extensions (Parasuraman et al., 1985, 1988, 1994a, 1994b; Zeithamal et al., 1993) have delved into the various facets of measuring service quality and the factors that influence the customer expectations and their perceptions. However, a concrete quantification of the ‘service gaps’ used in such models, is seldom found in the literature. As such, it is very much necessary to quantify the ‘service gaps’ and also to quantify the expectation of the service parameters as perceived by the customers. In the present paper, a prioritizat...