7 Factors in Service Quality
An executive summary for managers and executives can be found at the end of this article
Importance-performance analysis as a strategic tool for service marketers: the case of service quality perceptions of business students in New Zealand and the USA
John B. Ford
Professor of Marketing and International Business, College of Business and Public Administration, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, USA
Mathew Joseph
Associate Professor of Marketing, School of Business, Georgia College & State University, Milledgeville, Georgia, USA.
Beatriz Joseph
Adjunct Lecturer in Marketing, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Keywords Customer satisfaction, Higher education, Performance measurement, Service quality, Services marketing Abstract Intense competition in higher education in many different countries mandates the need for assessments of customer-perceived service quality for differentiation purposes. An instrument developed specifically from a business education setting was employed utilizing an importance/performance approach with seven determinant choice criteria groupings. A sample of business students in New Zealand and the mid-Atlantic region of the USA participated, and some important problems in perceptions were noted. Strategic implications for the universities involved and suggestions for future research are provided.
Introduction and background Marketing orientation Intense competition forces companies to adopt a marketing orientation in order to differentiate their offerings from those of their competitors. Service industries have been reluctant to adopt this kind of focus, and nowhere has this been truer than in the case of higher education. For many years colleges and universities were in the luxurious position of seeing ever-increasing enrollments and resultant budgets, but the boom of the 1970s and 1980s has been replaced by the bust of the 1990s. Universities are facing intense competition
Importance-performance analysis as a strategic tool for service marketers: the case of service quality perceptions of business students in New Zealand and the USA
John B. Ford
Professor of Marketing and International Business, College of Business and Public Administration, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, USA
Mathew Joseph
Associate Professor of Marketing, School of Business, Georgia College & State University, Milledgeville, Georgia, USA.
Beatriz Joseph
Adjunct Lecturer in Marketing, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Keywords Customer satisfaction, Higher education, Performance measurement, Service quality, Services marketing Abstract Intense competition in higher education in many different countries mandates the need for assessments of customer-perceived service quality for differentiation purposes. An instrument developed specifically from a business education setting was employed utilizing an importance/performance approach with seven determinant choice criteria groupings. A sample of business students in New Zealand and the mid-Atlantic region of the USA participated, and some important problems in perceptions were noted. Strategic implications for the universities involved and suggestions for future research are provided.
Introduction and background Marketing orientation Intense competition forces companies to adopt a marketing orientation in order to differentiate their offerings from those of their competitors. Service industries have been reluctant to adopt this kind of focus, and nowhere has this been truer than in the case of higher education. For many years colleges and universities were in the luxurious position of seeing ever-increasing enrollments and resultant budgets, but the boom of the 1970s and 1980s has been replaced by the bust of the 1990s. Universities are facing intense competition