Évaluation De La Qualité De Service (document en anglais)

Abstract

Service quality and customer satisfaction are very important concepts that companies

must understand in order to remain competitive in business and hence grow. It is very

important for companies to know how to measure these constructs from the consumers’

perspective in order to better understand their needs and hence satisfy them. Service

quality is considered very important because it leads to higher customer satisfaction,

profitability, reduced cost, customer loyalty and retention.

Purpose – The main purpose of this study theoretically is finding out how applicable

the SERVQUAL model is in the context of grocery stores and empirically, describe

how consumers (students) perceive service quality and whether they are satisfied with

services offered by these stores in Umea.

Design/methodology/approach – A self-completion questionnaire was developed from

the SERVQUAL instrument and distributed using a convenience sampling technique to

students in the Umea University campus to determine their perceptions of service

quality in grocery stores.

Findings – From the analysis carried out, it was found out that, the SERVQUAL model

was not a good instrument to measure service quality because some of the items under

the dimensions overlapped and regrouped under different dimensions from the factor

analysis carried out. It also showed some items associated to more than one component.

Some dimensions showed a reliability scale of less than 0.7 which could have been as

result of the wordings used in the questionnaires or the number of items used under each

dimension. Also, it was found that the overall service quality perceived by consumers

was not satisfactory meaning expectations exceeded perceptions and all the dimensions

showed higher expectations than perceptions of services.

Research implications – Theoretically, from the findings, it implies that the

SERVQUAL model is not the best tool to use measure service quality in grocery stores

because the dimensions do not best measure the construct in that context. Practical

implications suggest that grocery stores in Umea are not providing the level of service

quality demanded by customers. The findings suggest that grocery stores need to

improve all the dimensions of service quality from the gap analysis carried out.

Originality/value – This study contributes to

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