SERVQUAL
SERVQUAL is a multi-dimensional research instrument designed to capture consumer expectations and perceptions of a service along five dimensions that are believed to represent service quality. SERVQUAL is built on the expectancy-disconfirmation paradigm, which, in simple terms, means that service quality is understood as the extent to which consumers' pre-consumption expectations of quality are confirmed or disconfirmed by their actual perceptions of the service experience. When the SERVQUAL questionnaire was first published in 1985 by a team of academic researchers, A. Parasuraman, Valarie Zeithaml and Leonard L. Berry to measure quality in the service sector, it represented a breakthrough in the measurement methods used for service quality research. The diagnostic value of the instrument is supported by the ''model of service quality'' which forms the conceptual framework for the development of the scale (i.e. instrument or questionnaire). The instrument has been widely applie ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Servqual
SERVQUAL is a multi-dimensional research instrument designed to capture consumer expectations and perceptions of a service along five dimensions that are believed to represent service quality. SERVQUAL is built on the expectancy-disconfirmation paradigm, which, in simple terms, means that service quality is understood as the extent to which consumers' pre-consumption expectations of quality are confirmed or disconfirmed by their actual perceptions of the service experience. When the SERVQUAL questionnaire was first published in 1985 by a team of academic researchers, A. Parasuraman, Valarie Zeithaml and Leonard L. Berry to measure quality in the service sector, it represented a breakthrough in the measurement methods used for service quality research. The diagnostic value of the instrument is supported by the ''model of service quality'' which forms the conceptual framework for the development of the scale (i.e. instrument or questionnaire). The instrument has been widely applie ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Services Marketing
Services marketing is a specialized branch of marketing which emerged as a separate field of study in the early 1980s, following the recognition that the unique characteristics of services required different strategies compared with the marketing of physical goods. Services marketing typically refers to both business to consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) services, and includes marketing of services such as telecommunications services, financial services, all types of hospitality, tourism leisure and entertainment services, car rental services, health care services and professional services and trade services. Service marketers often use an expanded marketing mix which consists of the seven Ps: product, price, place, promotion, people, physical evidence and process. A contemporary approach, known as ''service-dominant logic'', argues that the demarcation between products and services that persisted throughout the 20th century was artificial and has obscured that everyon ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Service Quality
Service quality (SQ), in its contemporary conceptualisation, is a comparison of perceived expectations (E) of a service with perceived performance (P), giving rise to the equation SQ=P-E. This conceptualistion of service quality has its origins in the expectancy-disconfirmation paradigm. A business with high service quality will meet or exceed customer expectations whilst remaining economically competitive. Evidence from empirical studies suggests that improved service quality increases profitability and long term economic competitiveness. Improvements to service quality may be achieved by improving operational processes; identifying problems quickly and systematically; establishing valid and reliable service performance measures and measuring customer satisfaction and other performance outcomes. Definition From the viewpoint of business administration, service quality is an achievement in customer service. It reflects at each service encounter. Customers form service expectatio ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Valarie Zeithaml
Valarie Zeithaml is a marketing professor and author. She is the David S. Van Pelt Family Distinguished Professor of Marketing at Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Zeithml is an expert in the area of services marketing and service quality. In the 1980s Zeithaml and her co-authors developed SERVQUAL SERVQUAL is a multi-dimensional research instrument designed to capture consumer expectations and perceptions of a service along five dimensions that are believed to represent service quality. SERVQUAL is built on the expectancy-disconfirmation p ..., a quality management framework for services. She was named a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher in the report on "The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds." Selected publications Books * References External links UNC profile Living people American business theorists American marketing people Marketing theorists Marketing people University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction (often abbreviated as CSAT) is a term frequently used in marketing. It is a measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or surpass customer expectation. Customer satisfaction is defined as "the number of customers, or percentage of total customers, whose reported experience with a firm, its products, or its services (ratings) exceeds specified satisfaction goals."Farris, Paul W.; Neil T. Bendle; Phillip E. Pfeifer; David J. Reibstein (2010). ''Marketing Metrics: The Definitive Guide to Measuring Marketing Performance.'' Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc. . Customers play an important role and are essential in keeping a product or service relevant; it is, therefore, in the best interest of the business to ensure customer satisfaction and build customer loyalty. The Marketing Accountability Standards Board (MASB) endorses the definitions, purposes, and measures that appear in ''Marketing Metrics'' as part of its ongoing ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Customer Satisfaction Research
Customer satisfaction research is that area of marketing research, customer intelligence, and customer analytics which focuses on customers' perceptions with their shopping or purchase experience. Companies are interested in understanding what their customers think about their shopping or purchase experience, because finding new customers is generally more costly and difficult than servicing existing or repeat customers. Types of research Descriptive or documentary research Many customer satisfaction studies are intentionally or unintentionally only descriptive in nature because they give a snapshot in time of customer attitudes. If the study instrument is administered to groups of customers periodically, then a descriptive picture of customer satisfaction through time can be developed ("tracking" or cohort study).http://www.jatit.org/volumes/Vol74No3/2Vol74No3.pdf Inferential or models-based research Beyond documentary types of work are studies that attempt to provide an und ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Leonard Berry (professor)
Leonard L. (Len) Berry (born 1942) is a distinguished professor of marketing at Texas A&M University and a senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Berry is a past president of the American Marketing Association. He has studied service delivery in healthcare at the Mayo Clinic and in cancer care settings. Berry is Texas A&M's most cited faculty member on Google Scholar, with over 200,000 citations. Biography Berry earned bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Denver and a Ph.D. at Arizona State University. A longtime professor at Texas A&M University, Berry founded the school's Center for Retailing Studies in 1982 and directed it for 18 years. In 1983, Berry coined the term relationship marketing, which emphasizes the need for organizations to maintain (rather than simply acquire) customers. He is the University Distinguished Professor of Marketing and Regents Professor at Texas A&M University. He holds the M. B. Zale Chair in Retailing and Marketing ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Factor Analysis
Factor analysis is a statistical method used to describe variability among observed, correlated variables in terms of a potentially lower number of unobserved variables called factors. For example, it is possible that variations in six observed variables mainly reflect the variations in two unobserved (underlying) variables. Factor analysis searches for such joint variations in response to unobserved latent variables. The observed variables are modelled as linear combinations of the potential factors plus "error" terms, hence factor analysis can be thought of as a special case of errors-in-variables models. Simply put, the factor loading of a variable quantifies the extent to which the variable is related to a given factor. A common rationale behind factor analytic methods is that the information gained about the interdependencies between observed variables can be used later to reduce the set of variables in a dataset. Factor analysis is commonly used in psychometrics, persona ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Principal Components Analysis
Principal component analysis (PCA) is a popular technique for analyzing large datasets containing a high number of dimensions/features per observation, increasing the interpretability of data while preserving the maximum amount of information, and enabling the visualization of multidimensional data. Formally, PCA is a statistical technique for reducing the dimensionality of a dataset. This is accomplished by linearly transforming the data into a new coordinate system where (most of) the variation in the data can be described with fewer dimensions than the initial data. Many studies use the first two principal components in order to plot the data in two dimensions and to visually identify clusters of closely related data points. Principal component analysis has applications in many fields such as population genetics, microbiome studies, and atmospheric science. The principal components of a collection of points in a real coordinate space are a sequence of p unit vectors, where the i ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Competence (human Resources)
Competence is the set of demonstrable characteristics and skills that enable and improve the efficiency or performance of a job. The term "competence" first appeared in an article authored by R.W. White in 1959 as a concept for performance motivation. In 1970, Craig C. Lundberg defined the concept in "Planning the Executive Development Program". The term gained traction when in 1973, David McClelland wrote a seminal paper entitled, "Testing for Competence Rather Than for Intelligence". The term was used by McClelland commissioned by the State Department, to extract characteristics common to high-performing agents of embassy, and to help them recruit and develop. It has since been popularized by Richard Boyatzis and many others, such as T.F. Gilbert (1978) who used the concept in relationship to performance improvement. Its use varies widely, which leads to considerable misunderstanding. Some scholars see "competence" as a combination of practical and theoretical knowledge, cogn ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Disconfirmed Expectancy
Disconfirmed expectancy is a psychological term for what is commonly known as a failed prophecy. According to the American social psychologist Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance, disconfirmed expectancies create a state of psychological discomfort because the outcome contradicts expectancy. Upon recognizing the falsification of an expected event an individual will experience the competing cognitions, "I believe " and, "I observed " The individual must either discard the now disconfirmed belief or justify why it has not actually been disconfirmed. As such, disconfirmed expectancy and the factors surrounding the individual's consequent actions have been studied in various settings. Initial study Disconfirmed expectancy was famously illustrated in the 1956 book ''When Prophecy Fails'' by Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter. The book gave an inside account of a doomsday cult led by Dorothy Martin (given the alias "Marion Keech" to preserve h ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Quality Management
Quality management ensures that an organization, product or service consistently functions well. It has four main components: quality planning, quality assurance, quality control and quality improvement. Quality management is focused not only on product and service quality, but also on the means to achieve it. Quality management, therefore, uses quality assurance and control of processes as well as products to achieve more consistent quality. Quality control is also part of quality management. What a customer wants and is willing to pay for it, determines quality. It is a written or unwritten commitment to a known or unknown consumer in the market. Quality can be defined as how well the product performs its intended function. Evolution Quality management is a recent phenomenon but important for an organization. Civilizations that supported the arts and crafts allowed clients to choose goods meeting higher quality standards than normal goods. In societies where arts and crafts ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |